Taking advantage of this, Truedale—­anxious but strangely insistent—­fought his way past the men hired to defeat such a course, and got into the presence of a manager whose opinion he could trust.

After much argument—­and the heat was terrific—­the great man promised, in order to rid himself of Truedale’s presence, to read the stuff.  He hadn’t the slightest intention of doing so, and meant to start it on its downward way back to the author as soon as the proper person—­in short his private secretary—­came home from his vacation.

But that evening an actress who was fine enough and charmingly temperamental enough to compel attention, bore down through the heat upon the manager, with the appalling declaration that she was tired to death of the part selected for her in her play, and would have none of it!

“But good Lord!” cried the manager, fanning himself with his panama—­they were at a roof garden restaurant—­“this is August—­and you go on in October.”

“Not as a depraved and sensual woman, Mr. Camden; I want to be for once in my life a character that women can remember without blushing.”

“But, my poor child, that’s your splendid art.  You are a—­an angel-woman, but you can play a she-devil like an inspired creature.  You don’t mean that you seriously contemplate ruining my reputation and your own—­by—­”

“I mean,” said the angel-woman, sipping her sauterne, “that I don’t care a flip for your reputation or mine—­the weather’s too hot—­but I’m not going to trail through another slimy play!  No; I’ll go into the movies first!”

Camden twisted his collar; he felt as if he were choking.  “Heaven forbid!” was all he could manage.

“I want woods and the open!  I want a character with a little, twisted, unawakened soul to be unsnarled and made to behave itself.  I don’t mind being a bit naughty—­if I can be spanked into decorum.  But when the curtain goes down on my next play, Camden, the women are going out of the theatre with a kind thought of me, not throbbing with disapproval—­good women, I mean!”

And then, because Camden was a bit of a sentimentalist with a good deal of superstition tangled in his make-up, he took Truedale’s play out of his pocket—­it had been spoiling the set of his coat all the evening—­and spread it out on the table that was cleared now of all but the coffee and the cigarettes which the angel-woman—­Camden did not smoke—­was puffing luxuriously.

“Here’s some rot that a fellow managed to drop on me to-day.  I didn’t mean to undo it, but if it has an out-of-door setting, I’ll give it a glance!”

“Has it?” asked the angel, watching the perspiring face of Camden.

“It has!  Big open.  Hills—­expensive open.”

“Is it rot?”

“Umph—­listen to this!” Camden’s sharp eye lighted on a vivid sentence or two.  “Not the usual type of villain—­and the girl is rather unique.  Up to tricks with her eyes shut.  I wonder how she’ll pan out?” Camden turned the pages rapidly, overlooking some of Con’s best work, but getting what he, himself, was after.