"Well—assuming there's really something funny about that child's pitiful feet—it's utterly at odds with probability to place him, dressed as he is, in the shop of a Fifth avenue florist. No such establishment would dream of employing such a caricature of an errand boy.... Don't you see?"
"No," Nolan replied with an offensive echo of her inflection—"no, I don't see. It's Comedy, audiences are always howling for Comedy, and if anything on God's green earth can save this rotten picture it'll be the Comedy I'm sticking into it."
"Then I'm afraid it's hopeless."
"But I'll tell you what I do see." Nolan leaned over the back of his chair and grinned mirthlessly into Lucinda's face. "I see what I've seen all along, and that is there's no pleasing you, Miss Lee! Ever since I started on this picture you've had the old harpoon out for everything I did, and this, what you're saying today about this introduction I invented for you, is all of a piece with the way you've been acting all along."
"But, please, Mr. Nolan!"—Lucinda was trying her best to be temperate—"surely this isn't a reasonable attitude to take, surely you can make allowances for honest difference of opinion."
"Ah, it ain't your fault!" Nolan jerked angrily out of his chair and turned to the door, but delayed long enough to deliver a valedictory: "And I'm a sap to let anybody that knows as little about pictures get my goat like you do. Have it your own way—chuck the whole sequence out, if you don't like this introduction I framed special for you. It's your picture, I should worry what the piece of junk looks like when you're through with it. But I tell you one thing: If that introduction don't stand, my name can't go on the picture as its director. And that's flat, my lady!"
And before Lucinda could take advantage of this wide invitation to a withering retort, the door slammed on Nolan's impassioned exit.
XXXV
The day of the Last Stand in the Living-Room Doorway began auspiciously enough with receipt of a night-letter from Harford Willis stating that money matters had been arranged in conformance with Lucinda's wishes, and adding that Willis hoped before long to give himself the pleasure of calling on her in person; the business of another client was requiring his supervision in San Francisco, on the way out he could readily stop over in Los Angeles for a day or two, he was leaving New York the day he telegraphed.