The Story of a Play. William Dean Howells

into those two flabby idiots to-morrow. I see just how I can do it." He looked up and met his wife's adoring eyes.

      "You're wonderful, Brice!" she said.

      "Well, don't tell me so," he returned, "or it might spoil me. Now I wouldn't tell you how good you were, on any account."

      "Oh yes, do, dearest!" she entreated, and a mist came into her eyes. "I don't think you praise me enough."

      "How much ought I to praise you?"

      "You ought to say that you think I'll never be a hinderance to you."

      "Let me see," he said, and he pretended to reflect. "How would it do to say that if I ever come to anything worth while, it'll be because you made me?"

      "Oh, Brice! But would it be true?" She dropped on her knees at his side.

      "Well, I don't know. Let's hope it would," and with these words he laughed again and put his arms round her. Presently she felt his arm relax, and she knew that he had ceased to think about her and was thinking about his play again.

      She pulled away, and "Well?" she asked.

      He laughed at being found out so instantly. "That was a mighty good thing your father said when you went to tell him of our engagement."

      "It was very good. But if you think I'm going to let you use that you're very much mistaken. No, Brice! Don't you touch papa. He wouldn't like it; he wouldn't understand it. Why, what a perfect cormorant you are!"

      They laughed over his voracity, and he promised it should be held in check as to the point which he had thought for a moment might be worked so effectively into the play.

      The next morning Louise said to her husband: "I can see, Brice, that you are full of the notion of changing that love business, and if I stay round I shall simply bother. I'm going down to lunch with papa and mamma, and get back here in the afternoon, just in time to madden Godolphin with my meddling."

      She caught the first train after breakfast, and in fifteen minutes she was at Beverly Farms. She walked over to her father's cottage, where she found him smoking his cigar on the veranda.

      He was alone; he said her mother had gone to Boston for the day; and he asked: "Did you walk from the station? Why didn't you come back in the carriage? It had just been there with your mother."

      "I didn't see it. Besides, I might not have taken it if I had. As the wife of a struggling young playwright, I should have probably thought it unbecoming to drive. But the struggle is practically over, you'll be happy to know."

      "What? Has he given it up?" asked her father.

      "Given it up! He's just got a new light on his love business!"

      "I thought his love business had gone pretty well with him," said Hilary, with a lingering grudge in his humor.

      "This is another love business!" Louise exclaimed. "The love business in the play. Brice has always been so disgusted with it that he hasn't known what to do. But last night we thought it out together, and I've left him this morning getting his hero and heroine to stand on their legs without being held up. Do you want to know about it?"

      "I think I can get on without," said Hilary.

      Louise laughed joyously. "Well, you wouldn't understand what a triumph it was if I told you. I suppose, papa, you've no idea how Philistine you are. But you're nothing to mamma!"

      "I dare say," said Hilary, sulkily. But she looked at him with eyes beaming with gayety, and he could see that she was happy, and he was glad at heart. "When does Maxwell expect to have his play done?" he relented so far as to ask.

      "Why, it's done now, and has been for a month, in one sense, and it isn't done at all in another. He has to keep working it over, and he has to keep fighting Godolphin's inspirations. He comes over from Manchester with a fresh lot every afternoon."

      "I dare say Maxwell will be able to hold his own," said Hilary, but not so much proudly as dolefully.

      She knew he was braving it out about the theatre, and that secretly he thought it undignified, and even disreputable, to be connected with it, or to be in such close relations with an actor as Maxwell seemed to be with this fellow who talked of taking his play. Hilary could go back very easily to the time in Boston when the theatres were not allowed open on Saturday night, lest they should profane the approaching Sabbath, and when you would no more have seen an actor in society than an elephant. He had not yet got used to meeting them, and he always felt his difference, though he considered himself a very liberal man, and was fond of the theatre—from the front.

      He asked now, "What sort of chap is he, really?" meaning Godolphin, and Louise did her best to reassure him. She told him Godolphin was young and enthusiastic; and he had an ideal of the drama; and he believed in Brice; and he had been two seasons with Booth and Barrett; and now he had made his way on the Pacific Coast, and wanted a play that he could take the road with. She parroted those phrases, which made her father's flesh creep, and she laughed when she saw it creeping, for sympathy; her own had crept first.

      "Well," he said, at last, "he won't expect you and Maxwell to take the road too with it?"

      "Oh no, we shall only be with him in New York. He won't put the play on there first; they usually try a new play in the country."

      "Oh, do they?" said Hilary, with a sense that his daughter's knowledge of the fact was disgraceful to her.