“See what Gurney did to me—­to the play,” she replied naively.  “Just to be smart.”

“Whew!  Talk about the feminine propensity for proving a generalization by a specific instance!  Gurney is an old man reared in an old tradition.  He isn’t metropolitan journalism.”

“He’s dramatic criticism,” she retorted.

“No.  Only one phase of it.”

“Anyway, a successful phase.”

“He wants to produce his little sensation,” ruminated Banneker, recalling Edmonds’s bitter diagnosis.  “He does it by being clever.  There are worse ways, I suppose.”

“He’d always rather say a clever thing than a true one.”

Banneker gave her a quick look.  “Is that the disease from which the newspaper business is suffering?”

“I suppose so.  Anyway, it’s no good for you, Ban, if it won’t let you be yourself.  And write as you think.  This isn’t new to me.  I’ve known newspaper men before, a lot of them, and all kinds.”

“Weren’t any of them honest?”

“Lots.  But very few of them independent.  They can’t be.  Not even the owners, though they think they are.”

“I’d like to try that.”

“You’d only have a hundred thousand bosses instead of one,” said she wisely.

“You’re talking about the public.  They’re your bosses, too, aren’t they?”

“Oh, I’m only a woman.  It doesn’t matter.  Besides, they’re not.  I lead ’em by the ear—­the big, red, floppy ear.  Poor dears!  They think I love ’em all.”

“Whereas what you really love is the power within yourself to please them.  You call it art, I suppose.”

“Ban!  What a repulsive way to put it.  You’re revenging yourself for what I said about the newspapers.”

“Not exactly.  I’m drawing the deadly parallel.”

She drew down her pretty brows in thought.  “I see.  But, at worst, I’m interpreting in my own way.  Not somebody else’s.”

“Not your author’s?”

“Certainly not,” she returned mutinously.  “I know how to put a line over better than he possibly could.  That’s my business.”

“I’d hate to write a play for you, Bettina.”

“Try it,” she challenged.  “But don’t try to teach me how to play it after it’s written.”

“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?”