"That play is a hummer, Vandeford, if I can just make the dolts put it across. It is a genuine Hawtry vehicle, but in a new vein. It's a corking situation and yet rings true. Did any old dame really have the spunk to put that dinner-party across on both lover and husband that you've got in your play, miss?" As Mr. Rooney asked the question of Miss Adair, it was the first time that he had seemed aware of the existence of the author of "The Purple Slipper." "It's not my play, Mr. Rooney," Miss Adair said haughtily to the thick-skinned genius. "That--that situation is--was--is true, however." "Then it's your play all right!" declared Mr. Rooney. "The situation is all there is to any play. The staging is the rest. Anybody can put in good lines. Any simp can doll up the actors in costumes, and one actor can put the ideas across pretty near as good as any other, if he's directed all right; but when it's done, the play is the man's or woman's who made the first layout of the idea--and what the stage-manager does to it. Author and stage manager, I say. The rest is easy." "That's what I've been telling Miss Adair," Mr. Vandeford eagerly assented. "And authors ought to go off and die until the first night, too," Mr. Rooney continued to say. "When I staged 'Only Annie' for E. and K., I told that author if he came on my stage any more at rehearsals I would biff him one in the nutt, and I meant it, too. His thinks and mine ran into each other so bad that I was near crazed." "But an author writes a play and he or she knows--" Miss Adair was beginning to say to Mr. Rooney with kind patience, when he interrupted her as he rose to take his departure. "The author oughter write all he knows and let it go at that," he said as he spat on the carpet of the box with no sign of compunction. "The stage-manager can do the rest." And with no form of leave-taking he departed. "And the American drama has to be filtered through that sort of--of illiteracy?" Miss Adair turned and demanded of Mr. Vandeford. "The American drama is often written by people who have been too closely associated with books on a library shelf, so that it needs to be filtered through a little gross humanity to get across to--humanity in the gross, which pays to see it. If a scholar writes and produces a play scholars go to see it all right, but all the scholars in America only fill one theater twice, and then what is to become of scholar and wife and children, as well as producer, manager, and theater-owner?" Mr. Vandeford spoke slowly, choosing his words. "Aren't any of the stage-managers educated gentlemen?" demanded Miss Adair, with an interest that was fast becoming impersonal, for she had the wit to see that in some ways Mr. Vandeford's summary of the situation between author and stage-manager was sound.