"I presume you haven't heard from your lawyer yet, Linda ..."
"He hasn't had time to get my letter."
"I don't suppose—you couldn't wire him now? It would give us a frightful black eye if Nolan were able to say we couldn't pay him."
"But he's had twelve thousand or so already. Why should he get the balance of his fee if he refuses to earn it?"
"But he claims you as good as fired him——"
"No doubt he would." Lucinda corrected to the last letter that misstatement of fact.... "So you see, the truth is, Mr. Nolan fired himself in a pet because I refused to let him ruin the supper club sequences. Now if he wants the rest of his twenty-five thousand, he'll have to hire himself on again."
And eventually despairing of a change of heart in Lucinda, Lontaine took himself off to test his powers of moral or other suasion on Nolan; and at intervals during the evening called up to report progress, or rather that absence of progress which rewarded his best endeavours. Hope died hard in him, however; and some time after midnight the telephone routed Lucinda out of her bed to receive a somewhat disconnected communiqué to the effect that Lontaine's cunning as a diplomat had at length wrung from Nolan a promise to return to work the next day.
Strains of jazz which filtered over the wire, a singing background for the muzzy accents which retailed this glorious news, led Lucinda to infer that Lontaine was calling from Santa Monica, and to suspect that Nolan's capitulation had been to some extent at least due to the humanizing, at times, influences of the stuff the genial bootlegger vends; but perhaps no more than to the intoxicating kindness of Fanny's eyes....
To her taste the Affair of the Comedy Feet was something more farcical, though Nolan did take it in a depressing spirit of deadly seriousness.
In fact, one of the heaviest handicaps under which this young man laboured in his progress through life was a tendency to take frivolous matters, including himself, a shade over-seriously; a fault he shared with so many of his fellows of the studios that Zinn one day was moved to comment on its cause, not without psychological insight.