After Godfrey Vandeford had read the last violent purple line on violet, he dropped the letter on his desk and looked out of his office window with serious eyes that gazed without seeing, down the long canyon of Broadway, up and down which rushed traffic composed of green cars shaped like torpedoes, honking, darting motors, skulking trucks and jostling, tangled people. Flamboyant signs, waving flags, and gilt-lettered window panes made a Persian glow in a belt space up from the seething sidewalks to the sky line, and above it all the roar and din rose to high heaven. But Godfrey Vandeford was blind to it all and deaf, as he sat and brooded above the furious landscape. His blue eyes, set deep back under their black, gray-splashed brows, failed to take in the lurid spectacle, and his narrow, lean face was flushed under the bronze it had acquired for keeps from the suns of many climes. His lean, powerful body seemed fairly crouched in thought. Once he shifted one leg across the other, and as he settled back in his chair he tossed the violet letter over to Mr. Meyers without seeming to know that he did so. Then he plunged back into his absorption without seeing his henchman read rapidly through the missive, look at him once with a gem-like keenness, and again begin to read the purple-covered manuscript. "And we picked her out of a vaudeville gutter over beyond Weehawken just five years ago, Pop," Mr. Vandeford finally interrupted the flip of the manuscript pages to say, with a deep musing in his flexible, sympathetic voice. "You taught her to eat with the knife and the fork," growled Mr. Meyers from behind his violet barricade as he ripped over another page. "Mick!" "Oh, not as bad as that, Pop," laughed Mr. Vandeford, with a glance of affection at the young Hebrew delving in the corner for a jewel for him. "She's just--oh, well, they are all children--and have to be spanked. She wants to sell me out to Weiner after I've spent five nice, good years in building her into a little twinkle star, but I don't think it will be good for her to let her do it. I'll have to use the slipper on her, I'm afraid. I believe in hunches and I believe I'll just use that purple manuscript you're chewing to let her set her teeth in. She needs one good failure to tone her up. What's the name of the effusion in ribbons?" "The Renunciation of Rosalind," murmured Mr. Meyers, as he bent once more to the pages which he had been reading with eagerness when interrupted by his chief. "We could call it 'The Purple Slipper.' About what will the cast figure?" "Three thousand per week if you use Gerald Height at five hundred as per contract with him. But, Mr. Vandeford, sir, I would say for a play this is--"