cream-coloured Louis Sixteenth salon: an exquisite apartment,
delicately personalized here and there by luxurious fragilities
which would have done charmingly, on the stage, for a marquise's
boudoir. Old Tinker, in evening dress, sat uncomfortably,
sideways, upon the edge of a wicker and brocade "chaise lounge,"
finishing a tiny glass of chartreuse, while Talbot Potter, in
the middle of the room, took leave of a second guest who had
been dining with him.

Potter was concluding the rendition of hilarity which had
penetrated to the outer hall, and, merely waving the playwright
toward Tinker, swept the same gesture upward to complete it by
resting a cordial hand upon the departing guest's shoulder. This
personage, a wasp-figured, languorous youth, with pale
plastered hair over a talcum face, flicked his host lightly upon
the breast with a pair of white gloves.

"None the less, Pottuh," he said, "why shouldn't you play Othello
as a mulatto? I maintain, you see, it would be taking a step in
technique; they'd get the face, you see. Then I want you to do
something really and truly big: Oedipus. Why not Oedipus? Think of
giving the States a thing like Oedipus done as you could do it! Of
coss, I don't say you could ever be another Mewnay-Sooyay. No. I
don't go that far. You haven't Mewnay-Sooyay's technique. But you
could give us just the savour of Attic culture--at least the savour,
you see. The mere savour would be something. Why should you keep on
producing these cheap little plays they foist on you? Oh, I know you
always score a personal success in the wahst of them, but they've
never given you a Big character--and the play, outside of you, is
always piffle. Of coss, you know what I've always wanted you to do,