“Oh, do let’s play nice parts,” she remonstrated. “You know, if you once start in melodrama it’s the hardest thing in the world to get into anything better.”
He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “I think I make rather a silly villain,” he admitted.
“You see, I know what troubled you. I thought it out. You thought I could care more for the things the Thornburgs do for me than I do for the lovely way you took me in here and were good to me. Wasn’t that it?”
“Why, something like that.”
“Well, that’s silly. Politeness—that’s all it’s been with them. But the way you took me in, and treated me, and everything.... You don’t think I could be such a little beast as not to understand all that, do you?”
There was no other friction for many days. Indeed, Bonnie May was less frequently absent when Baron came into the house from his journeys about the city. She seemed after all to be developing only a limited interest in the Thornburgs.
Besides, Baron had a new interest thrust upon him. Baggot had arrived at a point in the development of his play which made him an incessant nuisance to all his acquaintances, and to Baron most of all. He could talk of nothing but his drama—“The Break of Day,” it was called—and he insisted upon consulting Baron, or inviting his admiration and approval, half a dozen times a day.
Rehearsals had begun over at the Palace, and the process of cutting, and elaborating, and altering, was almost driving Baggot mad. Mad with resentment, sometimes; or mad with excitement and anticipations.
“You’ll review it for one of the papers, won’t you?” he demanded of Baron on one occasion, indicating by manner and tone that a refusal was out of the question.