each _me_?' Goldwater could hardly believe his ears.

Pinchas wavered. 'I--I mean the company. I will show them the
accent--the gesture. I'm a great stage-manager as well as a great
poet. There shall be no more prompter.'

'Indeed!' Goldwater raised the eyebrow he was pencilling. 'And how are
you going to get on without a prompter?'

'Very simple--a month's rehearsals.'

Goldwater turned an apoplectic hue deeper than his rouge.

Kloot broke in impishly: 'It is very good of you to give us a month of
your valuable time.'

But Goldwater was too irate for irony. 'A month!' he gasped at last.
'I could put on six melodramas in a month.'

'But "Hamlet" is not a melodrama!' said Pinchas, shocked.

'Quite so; there is not half the scenery. It's the scenery that takes
time rehearsing, not the scenes.'

The poet was now as purple as the player. 'You would profane my divine
work by gabbling through it with your pack of parrots!'

'Here, just _you_ come off your perch!' said Kloot. 'You've written
the piece; we do the rest.' Kloot, though only nineteen and at a few
dollars a week, had a fine, careless equality not only with the whole
world, but even with his employer. He was now, to his amaze,
confronted by a superior.

'Silence, impudent-face! You are not talking to Radsikoff. I am a
Poet, and I demand my rights.'

Kloot was silent from sheer surprise.

Goldwater was similarly impressed. 'What rights?' he observed more
mildly. 'You've had your twenty dollars. And that was too much.'

'Too much! Twenty dollars for the masterpiece of the twentieth
century!'

'In the twenty-first century you shall have twenty-one dollars,' said
Kloot, recovering.

'Make mock as you please,' replied the poet superbly. 'I shall be
living in the fifty-first century even. Poets never die--though, alas!
they have to live. Twenty dollars too much, indeed! It is not a dollar
a century for the run of the play.'

'Very well,' said Goldwater grimly. 'Give them back. We return your
play.'

This time it was the poet that was disconcerted. 'No, no, Goldwater--I
must not disappoint my printer. I have promised him the twenty dollars
to print my Hebrew "Selections from Nietzsche."'

'You take your manuscript and give me my money,' said Goldwater
implacably.

'Exchange would be a robbery. I will not rob you. Keep your bargain.
See, here is the printer's letter.' He dragged from a tail-pocket a
mass of motley manuscripts and yellow letters, a