"Oh Vincent, control yourself, my boy; don't let your susceptible heart run away with you, as usual!" cried Manning as he lolled back, with hands locked behind his head, and looked smilingly at the playwright.
"And she is so refined," said his wife.
"What a Christina she would make in my new play!" ejaculated Haughtly.
Manning was now thoughtfully blowing smoke towards the ceiling. "What a fine Cecelia she would be for me in place of Miss Watson!" he remarked.
"That's right, both of you immediately plan to take her from me!" complained Constance half laughingly. "Well, you just can't have her. I found her, and she's mine!"
The men laughed. "She is too tall for Cecelia, Jack," said Haughtly, still clinging to his own idea, "but she would make a most perfect Christina."
"Oh, a few inches more or less wouldn't matter," returned the other quite as seriously; "stage characters can grow, you know, if they wish to."
"You might just as well both stop calculating upon her," said his wife with genuine seriousness, "for you shall not have her!"
Manning stood up and stretched his arms. "Well, I'll see to it that Vincent does not get her," he said, smiling. "If it is to be either of us, I'm the man!"
His wife looked at him with raised brows. "Well, I call that jolly impudent!" she observed scathingly. "Jack, your vanity is something enormous!"
"It will engulf him soon," said Vincent, who had also risen, "and we shall hear of the great Manning no more."
"Where are you going?" asked Mrs. Manning as her husband bent to kiss her.
"I am going to beard the wolf in his den," he replied playfully. "Harding is having a conference with Herman in an effort to do me out of my lease of the theatre. Belonging to the great tribe of wanderers, he does not observe the Sabbath, and while the city prays, he and the Trust conspire against an innocent Christian!"
"You mean they haven't given up the fight yet?"
"Not they! They are tenacious. Do you know that the Trust hired men to have everyone of my new posters destroyed? There is not one left on any wall in the city or Harlem."
"But how can they break your lease? I thought it was secure?"
"So did I. But they have bribed someone in my employ to repeat something I said about wanting to get out on the fifteenth as verbal evidence that I broke the lease."
"What piffle!" cried Constance indignantly. "Oh, I wish some-
