them he was simply a profitable customer who signified that he dined
there in order to be alone His table was up stairs. Below, there was
always the usual dinner crowd till theater time; and the music had the
faculty of luring his thoughts astray, being, as he was, fonder of
music than of work. As a matter of fact, it was in this little
restaurant that he winnowed the day's ideas, revamped scenes, trimmed
the rough edges of his climaxes, revised this epigram or rejected this
or that line; all on the backs of envelopes and on the margins of
newspapers. In his den at his bachelor apartments, he worked; but here
he dreamed, usually behind the soothing, opalescent veil of Madame
Nicotine.

What a marvelous thing a good after-dinner cigar is! In the smoke of
it the poor man sees his ships come in, the poet sees his muse
beckoning with hands full of largess, the millionaire reverts to his
early struggles, and the lover sees his divinity in a thousand
graceful poses.

To-night, however, Warrington's cigar was without magic. He was out of
sorts. Things had gone wrong at the rehearsal that morning. The star
had demanded the removal of certain lines which gave the leading man
an opportunity to shine in the climax of the third act. He had labored
a whole month over this climax, and he revolted at the thought of
changing it to suit the whim of a capricious woman.

Everybody had agreed that this climax was the best the young dramatist
had yet constructed. A critic who had been invited to a reading had
declared that it lacked little of being great. And at this late hour
the star wanted it changed in order to bring her alone in the
lime-light! It was preposterous. As Warrington was on the first wave