“I thought I saw you come through the lobby just now,” he said.
“Oh, was that you on the settee, talking to Miss Silverton?”
“She was talking to me,” said the playwright, moodily.
“What are you doing here?” asked Archie. He could have wished Mr. Benham elsewhere, for he intruded on his gloom, but, the chappie being amongst those present, it was only civil to talk to him. “I thought you were in New York, watching the rehearsals of your jolly old drama.”
“The rehearsals are hung up. And it looks as though there wasn’t going to be any drama. Good Lord!” cried George Benham, with honest warmth, “with opportunities opening out before one on every side—with life extending prizes to one with both hands—when you see coal-heavers making fifty dollars a week and the fellows who clean out the sewers going happy and singing about their work—why does a man deliberately choose a job like writing plays? Job was the only man that ever lived who was really qualified to write a play, and he would have found it pretty tough going if his leading woman had been anyone like Vera Silverton!”
Archie—and it was this fact, no doubt, which accounted for his possession of such a large and varied circle of friends—was always able to shelve his own troubles in order to listen to other people’s hard-luck stories.
“Tell me all, laddie,” he said. “Release the film! Has she walked out on you?”
“Left us flat! How did you hear about it? Oh, she told you, of course?”
Archie hastened to try to dispel the idea that he was on any such terms of intimacy with Miss Silverton.
“No, no! My wife said she thought it must be something of that nature or order when we saw her come in to breakfast. I mean to say,” said Archie, reasoning closely, “woman can’t come into breakfast here and be rehearsing in New York at the same time. Why did she administer the raspberry, old friend?”