"but—" He smiled quizzically. "I have gone to Harvard and to Oxford. I have tried to surround myself with modern young men and women, and to think theatre in terms of modern theory. I am of the new school."
He rose. He was dressed in inconspicuous gray, yet well-dressed. His hair was shiningly black.
"I don't belong to your theatre, Mr. Colman," he said. "I want to originate, not copy. In London, Nigel Playfair has done exactly what I plan to do right here in your Commodore."
"It won't work on Broadway. Even Hammersmith is not the Strand," said Henry.
"We'll find out. I have leased your theatre. You have already received three thousand dollars in advance payment."
"I'll give you back your money if you'll get out."
"No," said Howard Vee.
The Commodore, Henry Colman would have told you, had no bad seats. Its stage was compact; its orchestra pit brought audiences within whispering distance of its actors. The home-like little offices, three in number, were on the balcony floor. Howard sat in one of them surrounded by mementoes of the Colman past. On the wall hung an old photograph of Fritz Ungeld, next to the first night program of "Yvonne." In the corner was the ancient upright piano on which Riley and Doty had composed a score for "Yvonne," aided somewhat by Franz Schubert, Tchaikowsky, and the immortal Chopin. George Drury, in summer flannels, smiled benignly from an enlarged snapshot above the piano, happy in the thought that he had borrowed the idea of "Yvonne" from a Budapest operetta
