“The rehearsals are hung up.  And it looks as though there wasn’t going to be any drama.  Good Lord!” cried George Benham, with honest warmth, “with opportunities opening out before one on every side—­ with life extending prizes to one with both hands—­when you see coal-heavers making fifty dollars a week and the fellows who clean out the sewers going happy and singing about their work—­why does a man deliberately choose a job like writing plays?  Job was the only man that ever lived who was really qualified to write a play, and he would have found it pretty tough going if his leading woman had been anyone like Vera Silverton!”

Archie—­and it was this fact, no doubt, which accounted for his possession of such a large and varied circle of friends—­was always able to shelve his own troubles in order to listen to other people’s hard-luck stories.

“Tell me all, laddie,” he said.  “Release the film!  Has she walked out on you?”

“Left us flat!  How did you hear about it?  Oh, she told you, of course?”

Archie hastened to try to dispel the idea that he was on any such terms of intimacy with Miss Silverton.

“No, no!  My wife said she thought it must be something of that nature or order when we saw her come in to breakfast.  I mean to say,” said Archie, reasoning closely, “woman can’t come into breakfast here and be rehearsing in New York at the same time.  Why did she administer the raspberry, old friend?”

Mr. Benham helped himself to fish-pie, and spoke dully through the steam.

“Well, what happened was this.  Knowing her as intimately as you do—­”

“I don’t know her!”

“Well, anyway, it was like this.  As you know, she has a dog—­”

“I didn’t know she had a dog,” protested Archie.  It seemed to him that the world was in conspiracy to link him with this woman.

“Well, she has a dog.  A beastly great whacking brute of a bulldog.  And she brings it to rehearsal.”  Mr. Benham’s eyes filled with tears, as in his emotion he swallowed a mouthful of fish-pie some eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it looked.  In the intermission caused by this disaster his agile mind skipped a few chapters of the story, and, when he was able to speak again, he said, “So then there was a lot of trouble.  Everything broke loose!”

“Why?” Archie was puzzled.  “Did the management object to her bringing the dog to rehearsal?”

“A lot of good that would have done!  She does what she likes in the theatre.”

“Then why was there trouble?”

“You weren’t listening,” said Mr. Benham, reproachfully.  “I told you.  This dog came snuffling up to where I was sitting—­it was quite dark in the body of the theatre, you know—­and I got up to say something about something that was happening on the stage, and somehow I must have given it a push with my foot.”

“I see,” said Archie, beginning to get the run of the plot.  “You kicked her dog.”