"And the Savoy?" asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head. "A dream of the past," said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke. "Gatti's? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity the Chancellor's, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence—a pot of bitter twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It's most amusing on the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about myself. They are both most interesting subjects."
"Well, I don't like it," Miss Cavendish declared, helplessly. "When I think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel—I feel like a robber."
"Don't," begged Carroll. "I am really the most happy of men—that is, as the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn't so damned miserable. But I owe no man a penny and I have assets—I have £80 to last me through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next to yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made. That's enough."
"But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?" asked Miss Cavendish.
"I do—that is, I could," answered Carroll, "if I wrote the things that sell; but I keep on writing plays that won't."
"And such plays!" exclaimed Marion, warmly; "and to think that they are going begging!" She continued, indignantly, "I can't imagine what the managers do want."
"I know what they don't want," said the American. Miss Cavendish drummed impatiently on the tea-tray.
"I wish you wouldn't be so abject about it," she said. "If I were a man I'd make them take those plays."
"How?" asked the American; "with a gun?"
"Well, I'd keep at it until they read them," declared Marion. "I'd sit on their front steps all night and I'd follow them in cabs, and I'd lie in wait for them at the stage-door. I'd just make them take them."