and
was interrupted by a mild but sardonic "Hear! Hear!" from one of the
magazine reviewers.

"Honest players don't object to honest criticism, then," she amended.
"It's the unfairness that hurts."

"All of which appears to be based on the assumption that it is
impossible for Mr. Gurney honestly to have disliked Mr. Laurence's
play," pointed out Banneker. "Now, delightful as it seemed to me, I can
conceive that to other minds--"

"Of course he could honestly dislike it," put in the playwright hastily.
"It isn't that."

"It's the mean, slurring way he treated it," said the star "Mr.
Banneker, just what did he say to you about it?"

Swiftly there leapt to his recollection the critic's words, at the close
of the second act. "It's a relief to listen for once to comedy that is
sincere and direct." ... Then why, why--"He said that you were all that
the play required and the play was all that you required," he answered,
which was also true, but another part of the truth. He was not minded to
betray his associate.

"He's rotten," murmured the manager, now busy on the margin of another
paper. "But I dunno as he's any rottener than the rest."

"On behalf of the profession of journalism, we thank you, Bezdek," said
one of the critics.

"Don't mind old Bez," put in the elderly first-nighter. "He always says
what he thinks he means, but he usually doesn't mean it."

"That is perhaps just as well," said Banneker quite quietly, "if he
means that The Ledger is not straight."

"I didn't say The Ledger. I said Gurney. He's crooked as a corkscrew's
hole."

There was a murmur of protest and apprehension, for this was going
rather too far, which Banneker's voice stilled. "Just a minute. By that
you mean that he takes bribes?"

"Naw!" snorted Bezdek.

"That he's influenced by favoritism, then?"

"I didn't say so, did I?"

"You've said either too little or too much."

"I can clear this up, I think," proffered the elderly first-nighter, in
his courteous voice. "Mr. Gurney is perhaps more the writer than the
critic. He is carried away by the felicitous phrase."

"He'd rather be funny than fair," said Miss Raleigh bluntly.

"The curse of dramatic criticism," murmured a magazine representative.

"Rotten," said Bezdek doggedly. "Crooked. Tryin' to be funny at other
folks' expense. _I_'ll give his tail a twist!" By which he meant Mr.
Gurney's printed words.

"Apropos of the high cult of honesty," remarked Banneker.

"Th