“I begin to see the effect of the bill-board’s printing the star’s name in letters two feet high and the playwright’s in one-inch type.”
“The newspapers don’t print yours at all, do they? Unless you shoot some one,” she added maliciously.
“True enough. But I don’t think I’d shine as a playwright.”
“What will you do, then, if you fire yourself?”
“Fiction, perhaps. It’s slow but glorious, I understand. When I’m starving in a garret, awaiting fame with the pious and cocksure confidence of genius, will you guarantee to invite me to a square meal once a fortnight? Think what it would give me to look forward to!”
She was looking him in the face with an expression of frank curiosity. “Ban, does money never trouble you?”
“Not very much,” he confessed. “It comes somehow and goes every way.”
“You give the effect of spending it with graceful ease. Have you got much?”
“A little dribble of an income of my own. I make, I suppose, about a quarter of what your salary is.”
“One doesn’t readily imagine you ever being scrimped. You give the effect of pros—no, not of prosperity; of—well—absolute ease. It’s quite different.”