She answered in kind, and the acquaintanceship was progressing most favorably when a messenger of the theater manager's office staff appeared with early editions of the morning papers. Instantly every other interest was submerged.

"Give me The Ledger," demanded Betty. "I want to see what Gurney says."

"Something pleasant surely," said Banneker. "He told me that the play was an assured success."

As she read, Betty's vivacious face sparkled. Presently her expression changed. She uttered a little cry of disgust and rage.

"What's the matter?" inquired the author.

"Gurney is up to his smartnesses again," she replied. "Listen. Isn't this enraging!" She read:

"As for the play itself, it is formed, fashioned, and finished in the cleverest style of tailor-made, to Miss Raleigh's charming personality.

One must hail Mr. Laurence as chief of our sartorial playwrights. No actress ever boasted a neater fit. Can you not picture him, all nice little enthusiasms and dainty devices, bustling about his fair patroness, tape in hand, mouth bristling with pins, smoothing out a wrinkle here, adjusting a line there, achieving his little _chef d'oeuvre_ of perfect tailoring? We have had playwrights who were blacksmiths, playwrights who were costumers, playwrights who were musical-boxes, playwrights who were, if I may be pardoned, garbage incinerators. It remained, for Mr. Laurence to show us what can be done with scissors, needle, and a nice taste in frills.

"I think it's mean and shameful!" proclaimed the reader in generous rage.

"But he gives you a splendid send-off, Miss Raleigh," said her leading man, who, reading over her shoulder, had discovered that he, too, was handsomely treated.

"I don't care if he does!" cried Betty. "He's a pig!"

Her manager, possessed of a second copy of The Ledger, now made a weighty contribution to the discussion. "Just the same, this'll help sell out the house. It's full of stuff we can lift to paper the town with."

He indicated several lines heartily praising Miss Raleigh and the cast, and one which, wrenched from its satirical context, was made to give an equally favorable opinion of the play. Something of Banneker's astonishment at this cavalier procedure must have been reflected in his face, for Marrineal, opposite, turned to him with a look of amusement.

"What's your view of that, Mr. Banneker?"

"Mine?" said Banneker promptly. "I think it's crooked. What's yours?"

"Still quick on the trigger," murmured the other, but did not answer the return query.

Replies in profusion came from the rest, however. "It isn't any crookeder than the review."--"D'you call that fair criticism!"--"Gurney!

He hasn't an honest hair in his head."--"Every other critic is strong for it; this is the only knock."--"What did Laurence ever do to Gurney?"

Out of the welter of angry voices came Betty Raleigh's clear speech, addressed to Banneker.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Banneker; I'd forgotten that The Ledger is your paper."

"Oh, The Ledger ain't any worse than the rest of 'em, take it day in and day out," the manager remarked, busily penciling apposite texts for advertising, on the margin of Gurney's critique.

"It isn't fair," continued the star. "A man spends a year working over a play--it was more than a year on this, wasn't it, Denny?" she broke off to ask the author.

Laurence nodded. He looked tired and a little bored, Banneker thought.

"And a critic has a happy thought and five minutes to think it over, and writes something mean and cruel and facetious, and perhaps undoes a whole year's work. Is that right?"

"They ought to bar him from the theater," declared one of the women in the cast.

"And what do you think of _that_?" inquired Marrineal, still addressing Banneker.

Banneker laughed. "Admit only those who wear the bright and burnished badge of the Booster," he said. "Is that the idea?"

"Nobody objects to honest criticism," began Betty Raleigh heatedly, and was interrupted by a mild but sardonic "Hear! Hear!" from one of the magazine reviewers.

"Honest players don't object to honest criticism, then," she amended.

"It's the unfairness that hurts."

"All of which appears to be based on the assumption that it is impossible for Mr. Gurney honestly to have disliked Mr. Laurence's play," pointed out Banneker. "Now, delightful as it seemed to me, I can conceive that to other minds--"

"Of course he could honestly dislike it," put in the playwright hastily.

"It isn't that."

"It's the mean, slurring way he treated it," said the star "Mr.

Banneker, just what did he say to you about it?"

Swiftly there leapt to his recollection the critic's words, at the close of the second act. "It's a relief to listen for once to comedy that is sincere and direct." ... Then why, why--"He said that you were all that the play required and the play was all that you required," he answered, which was also true, but another part of the truth. He was not minded to betray his associate.

"He's rotten," murmured the manager, now busy on the margin of another paper. "But I dunno as he's any rottener than the rest."

"On behalf of the profession of journalism, we thank you, Bezdek," said one of the critics.

"Don't mind old Bez," put in the elderly first-nighter. "He always says what he thinks he means, but he usually doesn't mean it."

"That is perhaps just as well," said Banneker quite quietly, "if he means that The Ledger is not straight."

"I didn't say The Ledger. I said Gurney. He's crooked as a corkscrew's hole."

There was a murmur of protest and apprehension, for this was going rather too far, which Banneker's voice stilled. "Just a minute. By that you mean that he takes bribes?"

"Naw!" snorted Bezdek.

"That he's influenced by favoritism, then?"

"I didn't say so, did I?"

"You've said either too little or too much."

"I can clear this up, I think," proffered the elderly first-nighter, in his courteous voice. "Mr. Gurney is perhaps more the writer than the critic. He is carried away by the felicitous phrase."

"He'd rather be funny than fair," said Miss Raleigh bluntly.

"The curse of dramatic criticism," murmured a magazine representative.

"Rotten," said Bezdek doggedly. "Crooked. Tryin' to be funny at other folks' expense. _I_'ll give his tail a twist!" By which he meant Mr.

Gurney's printed words.

"Apropos of the high cult of honesty," remarked Banneker.

"The curse of all journalism," put in Laurence. "The temptation to be effective at the expense of honesty."