"Have you heard anything from Maizie since she left town?"
"Damn Maizie! How much do you want, anyhow?"
"Fifty—and transportation on the road."
He checked; whistled guardedly and incredulously; changed his manner, bending confidentially across the table: "Listen, girlie, yunno I'd do anything in the world for you—"
"Fifty and transportation!"
"But I had to pay the guy what wrote this piece fifty for a month's option. If I take it up I gotta slip him a hundred more and twenty-five a week royalty as long's we play it: and there's three others in the cast, outsida you and me. David'll want fifty at least, and the Thief thirty-five and the servant twenty-five: there's a hundred and thirty-five already, including royalty. Add fifteen for tips and all that: a hundred and fifty; fifty to you, two-hundred. The best I can hope to drag down is three, and Boskerk'll want ten per cent commission for booking us, leaving only seventy for my bit—and I'm risking all I got salted away to try it out."
He paused with an air of appeal to which Joan was utterly cold.
"It's a woman's piece," she said tersely; "if you get a sure-'nough actress to play it, she'll want a hundred at least, if she's any good at all. You're saving fifty if you get me at my price."
This was so indisputably true that Quard was staggered and temporarily silenced.
"And," Joan drove her argument shrewdly home with unblushing mendacity—"Tom Wilbrow says it's only a question of time before I can get any figure I want to ask, in reason."