"You don't like it?" Eric interrupted. "Why not?"
"I don't like it in its present form. I don't suppose you want a line-by-line criticism.… If you look at it in six months' time, you'll see my objection for yourself."
Eric raised his glass mechanically and was vaguely surprised to find himself drinking champagne. Then he remembered that champagne had been ordered to "buck" him "up"; he remembered, too, Manders' solicitude for his health, the enquiries when the play had been written and how long he had taken to write it, the evasion and silence the night before on the telephone and again at the beginning of luncheon, when he tried to extract a frank opinion.… Manders, then, was rejecting the play … and trying to be considerate.…
"We don't mince matters at rehearsal," he said with a breathless laugh. "You think the play's hopeless?"
Manders looked relieved, but he had known so many disappointments himself and seen others so often crushed by them that his brown, monkey eyes were full of pity.
"It's no use at all. In its present form or any other. If it had been any one but you, I wouldn't have read two pages of it. You may as well take the whole of your physic, boy; you've got to stop writing for the present, you've lost your sense of the theatre, you're forgetting all the tricks you ever learned. D'you know, when I read that thing, I thought for a moment that you were trying to palm off some old thing that you'd written when you were an undergrad?"
For a moment Eric lost his sense of distance; the long coffee-room was full of shouting and discordant laughter; a waiter, who seemed quite near, asked in a remote voice whether he might take the black pepper.… Eric gripped the edge of the table, praying that he might not disgrace himself.
"I wonder—why," he murmured faintly.
Manders shrugged his shoulders and filled both glasses encouragingly.
"It often happens. Graham Lever had three plays running in London at the same time; then he chucked romantic comedy and tried to write a revolt-of-the-younger-generation problem play.…" Manders omitted to add that Lever had never had another play staged, but Eric's ten years of dramatic criticism enabled him to fill the gap. "George Sharpe failed again and again for eight years; he had one success and then failed for three. It would be hard to think of a man who never loses his touch. Partly it's the author and partly it's the audience; they get tired … and, when one kind of play succeeds, all the other men unconsciously imitate, and the managers can only see money in that one kind, so that the public gets sated. With you …" He paused to tear his bread into lumps and throw it into his soup. "You probably want some fresh air. You've been living in the theatre too much, you've forgotten what real people are like. If you brought that play down and read it to the company——"