"Damn Maizie! How much do you want, anyhow?"
He checked; whistled guardedly and incredulously; changed his manner, bending confidentially across the table: "Listen, girlie, yunno I'd do anything in the world for you--"
"But I had to pay the guy what wrote this piece fifty for a month's option. If I take it up I gotta slip him a hundred more and twenty-five a week royalty as long's we play it: and there's three others in the cast, outsida you and me. _David_'ll want fifty at least, and the _Thief_ thirty-five and the servant twenty-five: there's a hundred and thirty-five already, including royalty. Add fifteen for tips and all that: a hundred and fifty; fifty to you, two-hundred. The best I can hope to drag down is three, and Boskerk'll want ten per cent commission for booking us, leaving only seventy for _my_ bit--and I'm risking all I got salted away to try it out."
He paused with an air of appeal to which Joan was utterly cold.
"It's a woman's piece," she said tersely; "if you get a sure-'nough actress to play it, she'll want a hundred at least, if she's any good at all. You're saving fifty if you get me at my price."
This was so indisputably true that Quard was staggered and temporarily silenced.
"And," Joan drove her argument shrewdly home with unblushing mendacity--"Tom Wilbrow says it's only a question of time before I can get any figure I want to ask, in reason."
Quard's eyes started. "Tom Wilbrow!" he gasped.
"He rehearsed me in 'The Jade God' before Rideout went broke. I guess you heard about that."
The actor nodded moodily. "But I didn't know you was in the cast.... Look here: make it--"
After another moment of hesitation, Quard gave in with a surly "All right."
At once, to hide his resentment, he attacked with more force than elegance the food before him.
Joan permitted herself a furtive and superior smile. The success of her tactics proved wonderfully exhilarating, even more so than the prospect of receiving fifty dollars a week; she would have accepted fifteen rather than lose the opportunity. She had demonstrated clearly and to her own complete satisfaction her ability to manage men, to bend them to her will....
There was ironic fatality in the accident which checked this tide of gratulate reflection.