“I scarcely know,” said Mr. Seven Sachs, calmly.  “I know I’ve played it myself fifteen hundred and two times, and that’s saying nothing of my three subsidiary companies on the road.”

“What is Mr. Sachs’s play?” asked Carlo Trent, fretfully.

“Don’t you know, Carlo?” Rose Euclid patted him. “‘Overheard.’”

“Oh!  I’ve never seen it.”

“But it was on all the hoardings!”

“I never read the hoardings,” said Carlo.  “Is it in verse?”

“No, it isn’t,” Mr. Seven Sachs briefly responded.  “But I’ve made over six hundred thousand dollars out of it.”

“Then of course it’s intellectual!” asserted Mr. Marrier, positively.  “That proves it.  I’m very sorry I’ve not seen it either; but it must be intellectual.  The day of the unintellectual drahma is over.  The people won’t have it.  We must have faith in the people, and we can’t show our faith better than by calling our theatre by its proper name—­’The Intellectual Theatre’!”

("His theatre!” thought Edward Henry.  “What’s he got to do with it?”)

“I don’t know that I’m so much in love with your ‘Intellectual,’” muttered Carlo Trent.

“Aren’t you?” protested Rose Euclid, shocked.

“Of course I’m not,” said Carlo.  “I told you before, and I tell you now, that there’s only one name for the theatre—­’The Muses’ Theatre!’”

“Perhaps you’re right!” Rose agreed, as if a swift revelation had come to her.  “Yes, you’re right.”

("She’ll make a cheerful sort of partner for a fellow,” thought Edward Henry, “if she’s in the habit of changing her mind like that every thirty seconds.”  His appetite had gone.  He could only drink.)

“Naturally, I’m right!  Aren’t we going to open with my play, and isn’t my play in verse?...  I’m sure you’ll agree with me, Mr. Machin, that there is no real drama except the poetical drama.”

Edward Henry was entirely at a loss.  Indeed, he was drowning in his dressing-gown, so favourable to the composition of hexameters.

“Poetry ...” he vaguely breathed.

“Yes, sir,” said Carlo Trent.  “Poetry.”

“I’ve never read any poetry in my life,” said Edward Henry, like a desperate criminal.  “Not a line.”

Whereupon Carlo Trent rose up from his seat, and his eyeglasses dangled in front of him.

“Mr. Machin,” said he with the utmost benevolence.  “This is the most interesting thing I’ve ever come across.  Do you know, you’re precisely the man I’ve always been wanting to meet?...  The virgin mind.  The clean slate....  Do you know, you’re precisely the man that it’s my ambition to write for?”

“It’s very kind of you,” said Edward Henry, feebly; beaten, and consciously beaten.

(He thought miserably: 

“What would Nellie think if she saw me in this gang?”)

Carlo Trent went on, turning to Rose Euclid: 

“Rose, will you recite those lines of Nashe?”