"I know." Bangs returned to his chair, and, dropping limply into it, his hands still in his pockets, stared despondently at his outstretched legs. "That's all it means to you," he went on, morosely. "Our partnership is one in a thousand. It's based on friendship as well as on financial interest. If I do say it, it represents a combination of brains, ability, backing, and prospects that comes only once in a lifetime, if it comes at all. Yet in one year you're sick of it, and tired of work. You're ready to throw it all over, and to throw over at the same time the men whose interests are bound up with yours. You're dawdling in cabarets and roadhouses and restaurants, when you might be doing Work--" Bangs's voice capitalized the word--"real work," he added fiercely, "work other fellows would give their souls to be able to do."

He ended on a flat note, oddly unlike his usual buoyant tones, and sat still as if everything had been said.

Laurie lit a fresh cigarette, drew in a mouthful of smoke, and exhaled it in a series of pretty rings. In his brief college experience he had devoted some time to acquiring this art. Admiringly watching the little rings pass through the big rings, he spoke with studied carelessness.

"It was a pretty good scene, Bangs," he said, "and it showed careful rehearsing. But it would be a lot more effective if you had a real situation to base it on. As it is, you're making a devil of a row about nothing. I worked like a horse all last year, and you know it. Now I'm resting, or loafing, if you prefer to call it that, and"--he bit off the words and fairly threw them at his friend--"it will save you and Epstein and Haxon a lot of mental wear and tear if you will mind your own business and let me alone."

Bangs raised his eyes and dropped them again.

"You _are_ our business," he somberly reminded his partner. "I've got so I can't work without you," he added, with a humility new to him. "You know that. And you know I've got the plot. It's ready--great Scott, it's boiling in me! I'm crazy to get it out. And here I've got to sit around watching you kill time, while you know and I know that you'd be a damn sight happier if you were on the job. Good Lord, Laurie, work's the biggest thing there is in life! Doesn't it mean anything at all to you?"

"Not just now." Laurie spoke with maddening nonchalance.

"Then there's something rotten in you."

Laurie winced, but 

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