My God! TOM (_Awed_) How much did you say? GRANT A thousand a week. MARIE You’re going to get that much for putting me into a popular success? GRANT Yes. TOM She isn’t worth it. GRANT (_Determined to have it out with them_) It was worth it to me. Think of the exquisite joy I had in revising my problem drama. Think of how I turned two hectic, distorted, twisted, selfish, miserable, little-souled characters into two self-sacrificing, sugar-coated, lovable beings! TOM You are not only a murderer but a hypocrite: you distorted life to win sympathy for us. GRANT The theater no longer has anything to do with life. It’s a palace of personality. TOM Well, what’s the matter with _my_ personality? MARIE Leaving him aside, what about me? GRANT You wouldn’t draw a cent. There wasn’t a dollar in either of you. MARIE Is that _my_ fault? You made us what we are. GRANT Yes; before I learned that the public pays to be pleased. Do you think there’s anything pleasing about either of you? Why, you couldn’t even be happy together. TOM This is getting damned personal. MARIE What right has the public got to be so proud of itself? There’s many a woman in the audience worse than I am. GRANT But they want to be flattered into believing they are as much like heroes and heroines as you are not. The successful playwright, like the fashionable portrait painter, flatters and never reveals. TOM While true artists like me starve? GRANT And dramatists who write “Lonely Ways” also starve. What are you two kicking so about? Because I’ve made you respectable, wealthy and happy? Do you think the general public cares a whoop in Hades what _I_ think of life, of my peculiar slant on the motives that mess up the characters that happen to interest _me_? No: all they want is what they want life to be. TOM How little you know of human nature. If we’d had a chance to be our true selves we would have been appreciated. GRANT By whom, pray? A few professional soul lovers. And they’d get into the theater on passes. No. You are caviar; most of the world lives on mush. So I mixed you in mush, sentimental glue, anything you want to call it. TOM You disgust me. MARIE But _I_ see hope for you. At heart you despise the crowd, as I did its smug conventions. GRANT (_Bitterly_) I hate what it has made me suffer. TOM Every great artist has despised them. I despise them. GRANT (_More seriously_) Only I think the public has its rights. They have the right to laugh, to watch virtue triumph, to behold success, to feel love win out, to see what they think is happiness. They have that right because their own lives are so full of the other things. And maybe they like to dream a little, too. MARIE Who’s mushy now? GRANT Don’t sneer at a popular success. It’s sometimes more difficult to perform a trick than climb a mountain peak. TOM Have _we_ artists no rights? GRANT (_Wearily_) Only the right to dream and starve. MARIE