"I'll pass the question up Friday, and then see what I'll do," Mr. Vandeford said slowly as if turning his back for the moment to something that stared him in the face.
All Friday morning he worked with "The Purple Slipper" machine with a bitter defiance in his eyes that made Miss Adair keep close to his side, though she didn't understand her reason for doing so.
"Is anything the matter?" she questioned, with her gray eyes stricken with alarm. The fear for her play in those gray eyes sent Mr. Vandeford into desperate measures. He asked Miss Hawtry to go to luncheon with him, and she graciously accepted.
"Where do we get in on Broadway after Atlantic City, Van?" she asked as soon as she was served with her iced melon.
"We get in all right," he parried, putting his spoon into his cantaloupe.
"That's fine. I don't mind that Atlantic City week, but I'm glad I'm past ever doing the road again except to the Coast. They'll eat up 'The Rosie Posie Girl' in Chicago and San Francisco." Miss Hawtry was deliberately declaring her intentions to Mr. Vandeford without saying a word about them.
"I'm going to take 'The Purple Slipper' over to London before I take it West." Mr. Vandeford answered her declaration with another not put in words, but so well did he know the workings of her shrewd, small mind that he saw that the game was up unless he did what he must do. During the rest of their luncheon they talked about the Trevors.
Straight from the Astor Mr. Vandeford walked into the office of Mr. Weiner.
"Weiner," he asked, without any sort of preamble, "will you give a month's [try-out] of my play, 'The Purple Slipper,' in your New Carnival Theater from October first to November first, with a proper guarantee, and then an option on an unlimited run there if it makes good, for a half-interest in 'The Rosie Posie Girl' without Hawtry?" Mr. Vandeford knew that he was offering Mr. Weiner a good thing, for the rights of "The Rosie Posie Girl" had been hotly contested by all the big theatrical managers on Broadway the winter before, and Mr. Vandeford had got them from Hilliard because of his success with "Dear Geraldine" by the same author. They had all coveted it because it was one of those combinations about the success of which there could be no doubt. In offering Weiner a half-interest Mr. Vandeford was aware that he was offering him at least a hundred thousand dollars, but Mr. Vandeford's hunch about the purple on purple was beginning to cost him dear, though at least a hundred thousand dollars did not seem too much to pay to keep the agony of failure out of a pair of sea-gray eyes that had trusted him the first time they had looked into his.
"With Hawtry it goes; without Hawtry, no, Mr. Vandeford," was the prompt answer.