e energy than the moribund are wont to
manifest. There was even a vigorous impatience in her tone as she went
on, "You know well enough what I was afraid of. And you know well enough
what I want to hear right now. Shoot, can't you?"

He shot. He stood up, backed away from the couch to where he could
conveniently regard its stricken occupant, and shot gaily.

"Well, it'll be a good lesson to you about me, this thing of your
thinking I was fooled over that piece. I s'pose you and Baird had it
between you all the time, right down to the very last, that I thought
he was doin' a serious play. Ho, ho!" He laughed gibingly. It was a
masterful laugh. "A serious play with a cross-eyed man doing funny stuff
all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes, I did!" Again the
dry, scornful laugh of superiority. "Didn't you people know that I
knew what I could do and what I couldn't do? I should have thought that
little thing would of occurred to you all the time. Didn't you s'pose I
knew as well as any one that I got a low-comedy face and couldn't ever
make the grade in a serious piece?

"Of course I know I got real pathos--look how I turned it on a couple o'
times in that piece last night--but even when I'm imitating a bad actor
you can see it ain't all acting. You'd see soon enough I was a bad actor
if I tried to imitate a good one. I guess you'd see that pretty quick.
Didn't you and Baird even s'pose I'd found out my limits and decided to
be what God meant me to be?

"But I got the pathos all right, and you can't name one great comedian
that don't need pathos more'n he needs anything else. He just has to
have it--and I got it. I got acting-plus; that's what, I got. I knew it
all the time; and a whole lot of other people knew it last night. You
could hear fifty of 'em talking about it when I came out of the theatre,
saying I was an artist and all like that, and a certain Los Angeles
society woman that you can bet never says things she don't mean, she
told me she saw lots of places in this piece that I was funnier than any
cross-eyed man that ever lived. And what happens this morning?" Hands
in pockets he swaggered to and fro past the couch.

"Well, nothing happens this morning except people coming around to sign
me up for three hundred and fifty a week. One of 'em said not an hour
ago--he's a big producer, too--that Baird ought to be paying me seven
hundred and fifty because I earned every cent of it. Of course I didn't
wan