ameful!" proclaimed the reader in generous
rage.

"But he gives you a splendid send-off, Miss Raleigh," said her leading
man, who, reading over her shoulder, had discovered that he, too, was
handsomely treated.

"I don't care if he does!" cried Betty. "He's a pig!"

Her manager, possessed of a second copy of The Ledger, now made a
weighty contribution to the discussion. "Just the same, this'll help
sell out the house. It's full of stuff we can lift to paper the town
with."

He indicated several lines heartily praising Miss Raleigh and the cast,
and one which, wrenched from its satirical context, was made to give an
equally favorable opinion of the play. Something of Banneker's
astonishment at this cavalier procedure must have been reflected in his
face, for Marrineal, opposite, turned to him with a look of amusement.

"What's your view of that, Mr. Banneker?"

"Mine?" said Banneker promptly. "I think it's crooked. What's yours?"

"Still quick on the trigger," murmured the other, but did not answer the
return query.

Replies in profusion came from the rest, however. "It isn't any
crookeder than the review."--"D'you call that fair criticism!"--"Gurney!
He hasn't an honest hair in his head."--"Every other critic is strong
for it; this is the only knock."--"What did Laurence ever do to Gurney?"

Out of the welter of angry voices came Betty Raleigh's clear speech,
addressed to Banneker.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Banneker; I'd forgotten that The Ledger is your paper."

"Oh, The Ledger ain't any worse than the rest of 'em, take it day in and
day out," the manager remarked, busily penciling apposite texts for
advertising, on the margin of Gurney's critique.

"It isn't fair," continued the star. "A man spends a year working over a
play--it was more than a year on this, wasn't it, Denny?" she broke off
to ask the author.

Laurence nodded. He looked tired and a little bored, Banneker thought.

"And a critic has a happy thought and five minutes to think it over, and
writes something mean and cruel and facetious, and perhaps undoes a
whole year's work. Is that right?"

"They ought to bar him from the theater," declared one of the women in
the cast.

"And what do you think of _that_?" inquired Marrineal, still addressing
Banneker.

Banneker laughed. "Admit only those who wear the bright and burnished
badge of the Booster," he said. "Is that the idea?"

"Nobody objects to honest criticism," began Betty Raleigh heatedly,