Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/372

 "I don't know," he said seriously. "Tell me one thing. You said I didn't need to be a 'realistic playwright' in order to understand"

She interrupted him. "Oh, yes; I saw your play in New York. My father and mother went to it and came home terribly shocked—at least Mother was and Papa pretended to be. I knew they hadn't understood it, so I went to the matinée the next day without telling them. I wasn't much shocked, of course—I saw what you were trying to do"

Trying'?" he said mildly.

"Yes. I thought so."

"Then you didn't like it?"

At this her voice became non-committal, a little evasive. "I shouldn't say just that. What I got from it was the idea that the man who wrote it could do something a lot better, something really important." She hesitated. "I thought he could—maybe."

The hesitant "maybe" was the worst of what she said; and so much needless honesty had an unfortunate effect. One of the most uncompromising of the novelists had written of "The Pastoral Scene" as "perhaps the most important play since the sweeping away of all previous forms of art; perhaps the founda-