“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.