Ralph Stock

“ Sprague lit a cigarette, and flung the match over the veranda railing.
“That's where you make a great mistake,” he said gravely, emitting smoke with the words. “Robert pretends nothing; that is one of the many superiorities of dogs over man. I do the pretending for him.” ”

“ A play has to be an established success before it is produced in Australia; but at home, in London, people wait out in the rain in queues fifty yards long. They buy camp stools and chocolates and papers, and sit munching and reading and waiting hour after hour. They wait because they go into cheaper parts of the house; but they are the ones who decide a play's success or failure. ”

“ Sprague continued, unmoved:
“If you remember, I told you it was only a seedling, and if you imagine there was no work attached to its cultivation you're quite mistaken. I ate lobster and went to bed directly afterward for tragedies. I went through tortures, mental and physical, in search of the necessary material for any drama that an editor could announce as 'of absorbing human interest.' In search of humorous anecdote, I once stayed with a sheep-herder, and lived on mutton and beans for two weeks, and got nothing but grunts from the herder and indigestion from his beans. ”

“ The child of your brain is there in the flesh, suitably dressed in suitable surroundings, doing the things you have made him do. Then there's the applause, and all the hundred and one little things that are impossible to get at through cold print. ”

“ I mean every word of it. We can't improve on nature; some of us think we can, but we can't, and there's going to be a very special kind of hell for those who pretend to be what they're not.”
The girl sipped her tea and set the cup on the edge of the table.
“What is one to do?” she sighed. “Your preaching is just the reverse of father's, yet you both sound right, taken separately. I should like you to meet father,” she ended thoughtfully.
“I should be delighted,” said Sprague. ”

“ It had bulging pockets, clearly labeled one, two, three, and four, and she contemplated it with a puzzled frown.
Sprague's laugh broke in on her reflections.
“No,” he said, “I don't 'save my hair.' That's the work.”
“The work?”
“The play. You see, each of those pockets is an act, and as I thought of what the people ought to say and do I scribbled it down and popped it into one of those pockets. It always happens that when you are at work on Act I. you think of something really splendid that ought to have been in Act IV., and vice versa ”

“ It's all a gamble, and the author who has placed his stake—perhaps a year's work on the play, and five in getting produced—on the wheel of public favor stands to lose all or win all at a single turn.”
Sprague stopped abruptly, and looked out through the veranda doors. The bathers had gone, and the brief Australian dusk was settling down on sea and beach and cliff. ”