A mean mind accepts but resents. Creevy said to Smull, with sufficient cunning to insure further employment:
“She takes her head and wears me out. Full of pep but don’t know anything. All the same, I’d rather handle that kind. If you want me to go on with her I’ll guarantee her.”
But Smull was fretting about the overhead. He had the financier’s capacity for detail. He prowled about the studio—when he could take his eager gaze off of Eris—prying, peeping, mousing, snooping, asking misleading questions of employees, gradually informing himself.
He put Creevy on the rack over the books. He told him, always with his fixed and sanguine smile, that the footage was forty per cent. unnecessary. He compared the cost of sets to Frank Donnell’s bill; the cost of transportation to the same item in Betsy Blythe’s company. Creevy writhed, not daring to show resentment.
But he did worse; he pointed out that Betsy Blythe had a limousine listed on Frank Donnell’s account, and that he had cut that out of the perquisites of Eris and substituted a taxi.
Of course Smull knew that. He had connived at this petty economy, but only partly from meanness; for it gave him a better excuse to offer his own car. And he cared nothing about the girl’s convenience.
He said to Creevy: “You start in and clean up this picture by the end of the week. You begin to cut Monday next.”
“All right, Mr. Smull. But I better start Marc Blither on the next——”
“What next?”
“The next picture. You have the continuity and director’s script——”