at the parade of supers in the calcium light. "I tried to write—newspaper stuff—for Bert Pittsey. And I couldn't do it at all."
"Newspaper stuff!" she said contemptuously. "No! But surely you could write the dialogue of a play. Look at that Polk. He can hardly write a readable letter. But he knows how people talk, and he knows how to put them on the stage."
He looked around at her in sudden surprise. "Do you know," he said, "I believe I could! I used to make them up—plays—for figures cut out of pictures—pictures from the old 'Graphic'—long ago. Wouldn't it be fun!—if I could!"
She touched him on the arm, to start him out for their turn in the procession. "Of course you could. It's the very thing you could do. It's what Edith said when she heard you were going to study law—that you had too much imagination for law or business or anything else unless you took to poetry. And no one can make a living out of poetry, whereas Polk has made thousands of dollars out of his 'Tommy Tenderfoot' alone. . . . I thought of it once, myself, and got a lot of books on the technique of the Drama and all that—I'll let you have them, if you wish—but I had no invention. I had to fall back on trying to dramatize novels. While you"
He scarcely heard her. His imagination had leaped to her suggestion like a child to a new toy. To earn his living by writing plays! It would be a game of "pretend" such as he had used to play with Frankie. It would be played in this glittering world of the
