"It kept me awake a whole night," I flashed out angrily.
Bonnyman smiled and yawned. "Kept me awake too, because I'd slept in the afternoon trying to read it."
"Oh! come now, Bonnyman," I protested. "You know better than that. Take the one scene alone," I went on eagerly, "where Holt is sitting with his dead wife, and the step-daughter comes to the door and he won't open because——"
But Bonnyman went on shaking his head with the impenetrable self-confidence any man acquires in time who exercises an habitual right of veto.
"Hugo and water!" he said. "Who can't write it? No, Prentice. To tell you the honest truth we're cutting out a lot of this problem stuff lately. What we're specializing in at present is the 'light touch.' The 'light touch,'" he repeated, illustrating what the world is hungering for, delicately, with an ivory paper cutter on his blotting-pad.
"'Polly Prattlings!'" I sneered.
"And d—d good stuff, too. Bring me some one like that, Prentice, and we'll talk.—Don't get angry, old man! Who is your little friend? American, ain't he?"
I nodded gloomily.
"Why don't he get a Rhodes scholarship and learn how to write English?"
"He's thirty-five," I said; "he's been all round the world and done everything."