"Not from—by accident, of her. She was predestined for the stage—I can see that clearly now, though I objected then. She was offered a chance during my absence, jumped at it, and made a sort of a half-way hit in a very successful sketch which, oddly enough, I happened to have written—under a pseudonym. It had been kicking round my agent's office for a year; he didn't believe in it any more than I did; and I disbelieved in it hard enough to be ashamed to put my own name to it. That's often the way with a fellow's work; one always believes in the cripples, you know.... Well, some actor chanced to get hold of the 'script one day, fell in love with it and put it on with Joan as his leading woman. If it had been anybody else's sketch, I'd never have known what became of her, probably. As it was, I knew nothing until I got back from the Coast.... I believe they got married very shortly after it was produced; and now they're playing it all over the country. Odd, isn't it?"
"Very," Venetia smiled. "And so your heart wasn't broken?"
He shook his head and laughed: "No!"
But a spasm of pain shot through his eyes and deceived the woman a little longer.
"And what have you been doing?" she pursued, meaning to distract him. "I mean, your work?"
He shrugged. "Oh, I've had an average luckless year. To begin with, Rideout fell down on his production of 'The Jade God'—the only time it ever had a chance to get over—and a man named Algerson bought his contract and put it on at his stock theatre in Los Angeles. That's why I went out there—to see it butchered."
"It failed?"
"Extravagantly!"
"But didn't you once have a great deal of confidence in it?"
"Every play is a valuable property until it's produced," he answered, smiling. "This one was killed by its production. Nothing was right: it needed scenery, and what they gave it had served a decade in stock; it needed actors, and what actors were accidentally permitted to get into the cast got the wrong rôles; finally, it needed intelligent stage direction, and that was supplied by the star, whose idea of a good play is one in which he speaks everybody's lines and his own. Then they rewrote most of the best scenes and botched them horribly."