"Don't misunderstand me, Selma Cross. No one knows better than I--how the sexes prey upon each other--how they drag each other to the ground. Only I was thinking of the poor things in ties, canes, cigarettes and coatings--out catching!... I saw the whole horrid, empty game of the stage. You have come wonderfully and differently into the glare, but let me ask where is Martha Boardman to-night--a few short years later?" "Yes, she was tired, her energy burned out, when she finally arrived. It's a stiff grade," Selma Cross said gently. "I would explain it, that she was prostituted from _excessive simulation_--season after season of simulation--emotion after emotion false to herself! The Law says, 'Live your own life.' The Stage says, 'Act mine,'--so pitiably often a poor playwright's abortive sensations! What can happen to a body that continually makes of itself a lying instrument? Like the queen-bee whose whole life is made up of egg-laying--the brain of this poor purveyor of emotions becomes a waxy pulp. As for her soul--it is in God's hands--let us hope." "It is good to laugh at you, Quentin Charter. You have another appetite. You wanted alcohol when I knew you first--now you thirst after purists and winged women. I have a lover now who can live among men, soar just as high as you do, work with just as much greatness and strength, without ever having degraded himself or believed all human creatures vile. The stage has its shams, its mockeries, but its glories, too. It is not all deranged by money-bags. The most brilliant of your writers give us our lines--the most wonderful of your mystics. It is true we simulate; true that ours is a constant giving; but call in your garret-high logic now, Sir Prophet: Look at the tired empty faces of my company, look at mine, after we have finished _The Thing_; then look at the strengthened grip on life and the lifted hopes which, each night, the multitude takes from out our breasts--and call ours a prostitution, if you can!" Charter arose and extended his hand, which she took gracelessly, but was instantly sorry that she had misjudged his intent. "Can't you see, Selma Cross, that you and I have no difference, no point for argument, if the general run of plays were like _The Thing_--as you make me see it? We had eliminated this from the discussion, but I have nothing but praise for Vhruebert, nothing but enthusiasm for Mr. Cabot and for you--if the combination gives the people an expansion of hope and a lifted ideal. Do that, and you need not reckon with critics." Instantly she changed her point of view again, so that he was both chilled and puzzled. "I should have been glad to come out in any successful play," she said wearily. "_The Thing_ just happens to have an uplift----"