There was no question of hurt pride to be debated within the mind of him, therefore.
He was just weighing the idea itself for what it was worth.
"Seems to me your plot-idea isn't so much tamer than mine, after all." He tested her shrewdly after a prolonged pause.

"You've got a killing in the first five hundred feet, and outlaws and rustling--" "Oh, but don't you see, it isn't the skeleton that makes the difference; it's the kind of meat you put on the bones! Paradise Lost would be a howling melodrama, if some of you picture-people tried to make it.

You'd take this plot of mine and make it just like these pictures I've been working in, Mr.Burns: Exciting and all that, but not the real West after all; spectacular without being probable.

What I mean,--I can't explain it to you, I'm afraid; but I have it in my head." She looked at him with that lightening of the eyes which was not a smile, really, but rather the amusement which might grow into laughter later on.
"You'd better fine me for insubordination," she drawled whimsically, "and tell me whether it's to be braids or curls, so I can go and make up." At that moment she saw Gil Huntley beckoning to her with a frantic kind of furtiveness that was a fair mixture of pinched-together eyebrows and slight jerkings of the head, and a guarded movement of his hand that hung at his side.

Gil, she thought, was trying to draw her away before she went too far with her trouble-inviting freedom of speech.