Gus Hill and I, started so prosperously with THROUGH THE BREAKERS, kept up a very pleasant association for several seasons, and whenever I meet him now after the passing of more than twenty-five years I am conscious of a feeling of good will and something that is almost affection. I wrote several plays for him and one of them, LOST IN THE DESERT, brought about my meeting with Elizabeth Breyer, a young actress who had been playing with E. H. Sothern. I with some difficulty persuaded her to become a member of the LOST IN THE DESERT company, and a few months later and with much more difficulty persuaded her to become a member of the Davis family. The last engagement has lasted some twenty-five years longer than the first and has been much more successful.

LOST IN THE DESERT was to have been a challenge thrown by Mr. Hill and me straight in the face of Augustin Daly, Belasco and Charles Frohman. We had made a lot of money with THROUGH THE BREAKERS and one or two other plays and saw no reason why we shouldn’t spend it. We built a wonderful production, hired a band of Arab acrobats, trained four horses, engaged a fine cast and worked very hard, but although the play wasn’t a failure it never made any money and in the end we lost our investment.

During the season in which Mr. Hill and I produced LOST IN THE DESERT which was, I think, my third year as a writer of sensational melodramas, I had played Syracuse and met Sam, Lee, and Jake Shubert, who had not at that time invaded New York but were in control of theaters in Syracuse, Rochester and Utica. They were boys at that time. I was twenty-six and Lee, the oldest of the Shuberts, was at least two years younger. Sam was a man of picturesque and colorful personality and had a real taste for the theater but I always thought the great success of these young men was due to Lee. He himself gave all the glory to his younger brother whose tragic death, however, forced him to come out as the head of the firm.

Lee Shubert is a strong and absolutely fearless man, not a lover of the theater as David Belasco is but a business man who plays with theaters and plays, with authors and actors as pawns in a game of high finance. His influence in the theater has been very great and no one who knows the story of his fight against Klaw and Erlanger and their powerful associates can fairly withhold real admiration for his courage and energy.

During the week my play was at the Bastable Theatre in Syracuse, Lee Shubert persuaded me to sign a contract taking over the Baker Theatre, Rochester, for a season of summer stock. I eagerly fell for his idea as I was hungry for the experience and knew that it would be of great benefit to me. I have always been curious to see the inside workings of every branch of the theatrical business and in the years since then I doubt if there is any ramification of the game in which I have not had a finger, sometimes a burned finger, but always an eager one.

I signed this contract and engaged a company in New York before I started on a western tour with LOST IN THE DESERT. Unfortunately, however, before the date of the Rochester opening came round, my share of the losses on LOST IN THE DESERT had so eaten up my profits on THROUGH THE BREAKERS that I arrived in Rochester with no assets beyond a perfectly good wife and fifty-four dollars in cash to meet fifteen trusting actors who were to depend upon me for their living for the next twenty weeks.

Details are apt to escape one’s mind after twenty-five years, but I have some hazy recollection of having been rather up against it there in Rochester. My books, however, prove that I opened the season with THE FATAL CALL—loss five hundred and two dollars—and followed with THE TWO ORPHANS—loss three hundred and six dollars. I can’t help wishing those books of mine told me how I did it.

One memory, however, is very clear. The play for the third week arrived from the play brokers, C.O.D., two hundred dollars, and lay in the express office as safe from me as it is ever possible for any play to be. I was quite at the end of my string and had no possible avenue of escape. That day, after the matinÉe of THE TWO ORPHANS, I said a polite good day to the deputy sheriff who seemed to have taken a great fancy to my private chair in the theater’s box office and started walking the streets trying to think of some possible means of keeping my company together. In my walk I passed a second hand book store and my eye caught the title of a ragged old volume in the tray marked “ten cents”—UNDER TWO FLAGS. This cross marks the spot where I started a trick of high pressure play writing, a trick which of course I put sternly behind me long years ago, although I have never been able to convince many people of my reformation. In any case Owen Davis’ Baker Theatre Stock Company opened five days later in a dramatization of UNDER TWO FLAGS and played for four weeks—profit $10,250 (by the book).

For four years I ran this company in Rochester every summer and during that time, in partnership with the Shuberts, took over houses in Syracuse, Utica, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. They were busy years. In Rochester I was company manager, stage director, press agent, head box-office boy and whenever business got bad I’d write the next week’s play to save paying for one.

During all this time Mrs. Davis was a member of the company and adored by the Rochester audiences. She might have had a brilliant career in the theater if she had chosen to stick to it instead of devoting her life to “her men” as she has always called us, “her men” being myself and our sons, Donald and Owen, Jr. For a long time I am afraid she found it very hard to give up the work she loved but I am sure she is well rewarded for her sacrifice now in the excitement and joy of seeing these two boys climbing so sturdily ahead on the path she knows so well—an unusual experience for a mother—not only to have hope and faith in her sons but to know exactly what each step they take means and where they are going.

During the following five years we divided our time between these stock companies in the summer and New York in the winter. In those five years I wrote thirty-eight melodramas, two farces, a number of vaudeville acts and burlesque pieces and one big show for the Hippodrome, as well as picking up any other little job that came to hand.

It was during this time I wrote my first play for Sam Harris, then a member of the firm of Sullivan, Harris and Woods, and started a friendship that has lasted ever since. A little later Al Woods sent for me and told me he was leaving the firm and was about to set up for himself. Our interview ended in the drawing of the most remarkable contract ever made between a manager and an author. By its terms Woods was to produce not less than four new plays, and after the first year, four old ones each season for five years. During that time I could not write for any other manager and he could not produce a play written by any other author. During the five years Mr. Woods produced fifty odd plays of mine but we both of us cheated shamefully on the other part of our agreement. We produced a number of plays by the late Theodore Kramer and I sneaked a few over with other popular-priced managers of the day.

Woods was, and is, a remarkable man, a great showman and a man of humorous and philosophic nature. His outstanding characteristic is, to me, that if he loves a play he knows how to produce it. If he tries to do a play he doesn’t love he knows nothing about it and cares less. He has but two opinions of a play when he reads it, “Swell” or “It don’t appeal to me,” and when he plays his hunch he’s very apt to succeed. This instinctive feel for values is one of the greatest assets in the equipment of the theatrical manager and Al Woods and William A. Brady have more of it than any other men of my time. It is a pure instinct, quite apart from any critical faculty and is emotional rather than the result of any reasoning.

David Belasco, a great showman, always seemed to me to see in a play manuscript the thing it would develop into under his guidance, but Woods and Brady sense an audience’s response to certain sorts of melodramatic situations and when they play their instinct and not their judgment they usually are right.

The first play under my contract with Woods was THE CONFESSIONS OF A WIFE, which really wasn’t nearly so dreadful as it sounds. The second was THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST, probably the best popular-priced melodrama produced during these years. Then came CONVICT 999, CHINATOWN CHARLIE and the famous NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL.

During my time with Al Woods, one of our most unusual experiences was with a melodrama called THE MARKED WOMAN and only a day or two ago, when I dropped into Mr. Woods’ office for a friendly chat, Martin Herman, Mr. Woods’ brother and general manager, gravely brought us in a contract, yellow with age, to remind us of an absurd but to us at the time a perfectly normal activity. In those days everything was fish that came to our net. If a particularly horrible murder excited the public, we had it dramatized and on the stage usually before any one knew who had been guilty of the crime. Frequently I have had a job of hasty re-writing when it became evident that my chosen culprit from real life was an innocent and perfectly respectable citizen.

I went into the Woods office one day about twenty-five years ago and noticed a well-dressed and well-mannered young Chinaman patiently seated in a chair in the waiting room. I asked Martin Herman what he wanted and Martin replied that he was crazy and that Al couldn’t be bothered with him. Later in the day, however, Oriental patience conquered and as a result I was called into conference with Mr. Woods and this well-mannered Chinaman.

With some difficulty Woods and I were made to understand that our friend from the Orient was the custodian of a very large sum of real money which he wanted to devote to the cause of the Liberal Party in China. These were the days of the old Empress and the Republican Party was just beginning to be heard from. Part of their activity was to arouse in America an antagonism toward the late Empress Dowager and I was asked to write and Mr. Woods to produce a play in which the poor old lady would be shown up as a sort of composite picture of all the evil characters of history. Woods and I had never met any Empresses at the time—although at this writing I understand Mr. Woods is in the habit of hobnobbing with all the crowned heads of Europe—but as there was no doubt at all of the money being both real and plentiful we swallowed our scruples, if we had any, and what I did to the old Empress of China I shudder to recall.

When I finished the play and took it to Woods, he said it was a whale, although I myself had some doubts of its merit. Our Chinese angel, by now reËnforced by a committee of his fellow countrymen, said it was without doubt a mighty drama and their only suggestion was that they would like to see a scene put in where the Empress poisoned a child. I sternly refused to surrender the integrity of my script, although I made some small concessions in the nature of arson and murder and THE MARKED WOMAN was ready for production.

The popular-priced circuit never had seen such a lavish display—please remember that all bills were paid by the Republican Party of China—costumes had been sent us from Pekin, the duty alone on which was many times more than any play had ever cost us. To this day my wife has several gorgeous Chinese robes, her only graft in all these years.

THE MARKED WOMAN, to my surprise, was a great success from the first, although Edward E. Rose, who staged it, and I were not quite satisfied with the last act and determined to improve it. About three weeks after the opening, Mr. Rose and I jumped out to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the company was playing, and watched a matinÉe performance. As soon as the final curtain fell we rushed back stage and called the company for rehearsal. I seated myself at a table with a pad of paper and threw the sheets at Ed Rose as I filled them while he forced the lines into the poor actors’ heads and re-grouped and re-staged the scenes. The result was that we played that night, only three hours later, the last act for our second act and the second act for our last. This was, I am confident, about as complete a job of revision as was ever accomplished between a matinÉe and a night.

All went well with THE MARKED WOMAN for some time but one day our Chinese backers called on Mr. Woods and told him that the play must close at once. Mr. Woods, who had a hit on his hands, smiled pleasantly and asked the reason and was told that the most powerful of the Chinese Tongs had threatened to kill our friends if the play was performed after one more week. Mr. Woods expressed great sympathy but said he was sorry but his duty to me, the author, prevented him from doing as they requested. The next day the gentlemen returned to say that the Tong had informed them that they had slightly altered their plan and now proposed if the play continued to kill Mr. Woods. Al said that it was a lousy play anyway and he had never liked it, but a statement from Pittsburgh showing a big profit calmed him sufficiently to enable him to defy the Tongs to do their worst.

The next day letters with death heads began to arrive and as these failed to ruffle his majestic calm a voice, speaking broken English, called him on the telephone and informed him that if the play was performed even once after the following Saturday night his body would be found in the East River the following Monday. As Mr. Woods’ body is still to be found comfortably seated in his office at the Eltinge Theatre, it is not difficult to deduct his reaction to that voice—we closed.

For eight years the Stair and Havlin Circuit, as the string of popular-priced theaters that extended across the United States was called, were amazingly prosperous and in their rise, their prosperity and their decline, I should like to trace an analogy between them and the motion picture industry of the present day—in the nature of a warning and a prophecy.

During the eight years of which I am writing the average business of these theaters was definitely fixed at about three thousand five hundred dollars a week. The fluctuations of business were nominal, the people wanted our shows, just as to-day there is a fixed demand for talking pictures, not for a good picture, although already one may see evidences of discrimination on the part of the public which, I fear, the picture companies are no more prepared to gratify than we of the old popular-priced theater were in our day. All we had to do was to see that our weekly running expense came to five hundred dollars less than our share of the take—then multiply this by forty, as the houses were open forty weeks a year, and we had a profit of twenty thousand a year from each show.

During each of these years we had from seven to thirteen plays of my writing on this circuit.

Then one day—and let me call the attention of the rulers of the motion picture business to this—Mr. Woods and I were struck by a great notion. “We will,” we said, “increase this average business of $3,500 by putting out a show so much bigger than any of the others that we can safely count on over-capacity business to pay our increased expense and yield us a greater than average profit.”

No sooner said than done. Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model took to the road and played for a year to an average of four thousand dollars a week. What could be more natural than to continue the good work? The next season we put out three more “big shows” and allowed them to cost us about thirty percent more than our old average of expense. By this time our rivals, attracted by the reports of our big business with our “Super-Specials” began to compete for this added revenue and produced a flock of “Super-Specials” which in a season, since all things are comparative, educated the public to expect “big shows.” Thus, the average show now costs a sum of money that could only be drawn by an extraordinary show, and in three years the popular-priced theater business was dead.

Naturally, the advance of the pictures had something to do with our defeat, but neither then nor now can the decline of the theater be fairly laid to the fact that the public prefers the motion picture to the drama. All of the ills of the theater in my time are due directly to the folly, the ignorance and the greed of the theatrical manager. I have many life-long friends among these men; among them are men of fine principle and honest intentions, but the composite manager has always been the stumbling block in the way of our progress. We tried to fight the advancing wave of motion pictures with dirty, ill-lighted theaters, bad-mannered attendants and arrogant box-office men, and we lost, as we deserved to lose.

There is a popular idea that the theatrical manager failed at his job because he allowed his artistic soul to overwhelm his natural business instincts. In my humble opinion he failed because he usually had no artistic soul at all and no business instincts. I know of about five managers of the last decade who were what I would call business men, and I am prepared to offer a silver cup for the names of any others.

The arrogance of the old-time manager, to whom actors and authors were slaves and chattels, has gone, and although I was one of those who fought for their passing I have not as yet become reconciled to their substitutes. The best men of to-day are still the men who were the best of the old order and if some of their old power is gone I can’t help feeling that with it went much of the old glamour and romance of the theater.

This writing rubber stamp stories by formula was the main cause of the collapse of the Stair and Havlyn Circuit and is the only real reason for to-day’s depression in the New York theater. There is always an audience for a good play, but unfortunately there isn’t always a good play for an audience. Just as every good play produced stimulates theatergoing, so does every bad play produced discourage it, and when the bad plays outnumber the good by too great a proportion the public naturally becomes very cautious. We figure of late in the theater that only one play out of seven produced is even moderately successful, which when you come to think of it isn’t so much the public’s lack of interest as it is the playwright’s lack of skill.

When a man has spent time and money to see six terrible plays one after the other it isn’t surprising that his eagerness is somewhat cooled. If it were possible to bring into New York this season fifteen fine plays we should hear no more talk about hard times in the theater. Unfortunately it isn’t possible.

Under the present conditions the demand for good plays has little effect upon the supply partly because good plays are hard to write and even more because we are not in agreement as to what constitutes a good play.

The novelist often succeeds upon his literary style, a painter by his drawing and his sense of color, but paradoxically enough a good play is a bad play unless the writer has been fortunate in the choice of his subject matter; skill alone won’t save him. Since the only real standard by which one may judge a play is the rather primitive one of whether one likes it or not, it is easy to see how dangerous a game this play writing is. A good workman may work his heart out for many months to be condemned at last by the same feeling that gave birth to the old doggerel “I do not like you, Doctor Fell.”

Few critics are clever enough to make the distinction between a writer’s skill and his good or evil fortune in the choice of his subject, and I am often amused to read the praises of the genius of an author who has been lucky enough to hit upon a theme or story that has tickled the public’s fancy and the complete damnation of the poor wretch who has failed to do so, although in every other particular the later play may be ten times as well built and well written as the former. Naturally we like to be amused and resent being bored. Yet, as a matter of truth, the same skill, the same hard work and the same knowledge of life and of play structure goes into a man’s failures as he puts into his successes. The writer who knows his trade fails or triumphs the hour he makes his decision of what he is going to write about. Then, too, the subject matter of plays is still far too often dictated by the manager and between us we are still getting ourselves into trouble trying to guess what the public wants instead of trying to do the best work we know how to do and letting it go at that. The old notion that the experienced showman knows more about plays than our present public knows dies hard and many of our plays are still being written by and for an intelligence distinctly below the average intelligence of the audience.

The day of the routine comedy-drama and melodrama is over. The successful play of to-day is nine times out of ten a good play. In fact the most encouraging thing about the theater to-day is not that good plays are sure of success but that bad plays are sure of failure. An optimist may look happily forward to the time when writers and managers who remain blind to the change in public taste and persist in producing routine sugar-coated piffle will all have starved to death or been driven out of the business.

This change has come about very gradually, as immigration has been restricted and the living standards of the American people have advanced. Life to-day is stimulating where once it was, at least for the majority, dull and uneventful. Romance, once supplied almost wholly by the theater, is all about us. Modern thought, modern invention, have done much to end the bland acceptance of routine fiction, both on the stage and on the printed page, and to be sure of an audience to-day one must have something to say and know how to say it.

Of course, I am writing now of twenty years ago but even then the change was coming and in a way I was alive to it. I am, at this point, quite willing to admit that I frequently turn out work far beneath the standard that my observation tells me is necessary for success, and that to-morrow I am quite as apt to start frantically at work on an untrue and obsolete theme as any novice. There are writers who are under the control of their own critical faculty, but unfortunately for me I have never been one of them. A story pops into my head. Often I know it has no importance at all and sternly shut it out. But, as is often the case, if the story keeps coming back of its own free will I usually end by forgiving it its obvious faults and gradually working myself up into a lather of paternal pride.... Who ever saw a young mother whose baby didn’t seem remarkable to her? These yarns of mine seem good to me because they are mine. If any one else was to ask my opinion of the same story I would say it was terrible, but by the time I have lived with it for a month or so I see beauty in it, because I am looking at it hoping to see that beauty.

As a matter of fact, one of the greatest differences between a good play and a bad one is that a good play says what the writer thinks it says, while a bad one doesn’t. Play writing is really an extraordinary difficult art; if all that was necessary for an emotion to reach an audience was for the writer to feel that emotion, we would have few failures. It is quite possible for a writer to be honestly affected by the sorrows of a character without the audience in the least sharing his feeling. I have often wept as I wrote a scene that never in the least affected any one besides myself. I have chuckled over many a farce situation that never got a laugh. A playwright’s words and his situations must have that strange power that will project them over the footlights. This projecting force is made up of instinct, experience, sincerity and a queer sense of rhythm, the timing of the dramatist.

When I am asked how much play writing may be taught I always hesitate. A lot may be taught—to the right person—very little to the one without the instinctive ear—the sense of pace and build that must be there, although just exactly what it is and where it comes from I find it difficult to explain.

I dug up recently, out of my files, one of the first plays I ever wrote, and was amazed at its crudity, but even more amazed by the lilt of it; its pace, its timing and its gradual accumulation to its crescendo were as deft and as sure as anything I could write to-day ... and at the time I wrote it these things were entirely instinctive. One may learn a lot about what not to write, may learn much of literary style and taste and many of the tricks of construction, but I doubt if any one without the instinctive feel of the born dramatist can learn how to time a speech or pitch a climax and without this all the rest is useless.

Many of the greatest novelists, both of the past and the present, have failed utterly when they tried to write for the theater. Often they were far better writers than any dramatist I know. They knew as much about moods and character as any of us—but their words won’t play, no one can act their scenes.

Few persons realize how vital this instinctive timing is to a play. Bartley Campbell, a dramatist of the old school, was a master of it. His old drama, THE WHITE SLAVE, was quite as lyric as any song. The late Charles Kline could time a climax so deftly that, although “the big scene” of THE LION AND THE MOUSE hardly makes sense when you read the words, it was impossible not to be thrilled by them when you heard them spoken.

The writer of the old school was more dependent upon this instinctive timing than the writer of to-day, but even now the man or woman who writes for the theater must write “good theater” no matter how sound may be his philosophy. Instinct and emotion will, I think, always be more vital to success than literary style or even good sense and logic.

To-day a writer must avoid the conventions just as yesterday he had to abide by them, and in this difference lies the distinction between the old school and the new. In the days of which I am writing, the characters of our popular-priced plays were as sturdily founded upon a conventional mold as the most dogmatic creed of the most narrow-minded religious fanatics of the day, and any stepping aside upon a more flowery path was sternly frowned upon. The good play maker of the popular-priced theater was supposed to know what a proper list of characters for a play must be and any departure from that accepted list was taken as a sign of the bad workman.

In my day the list ran as follows:

1. Hero.

The hero was either poor or else very young and very drunk. If sober and wealthy he automatically became a villain. Wild young men with wealthy fathers might do in a pinch—they could be reformed by the heroine in the third act, and in this lady’s company, in the last act, they could receive the father’s blessing and the keys to the cellar, or whatever best represented the family fortune. I was, however, never very strong for the rich young man type of hero, well knowing how much closer to the hearts of the audience the honest working man type was sure to be. Brave this hero must always be, and strong and kind, but it was unfortunately difficult for him to be wise, as the burden of troubles it was necessary to load upon this poor man’s shoulders, by way of dramatic suspense, would never have been carried by any one but a terrible sap.

2. Heroine.

If the hero was extremely poor, it was possible for her to be extremely wealthy, but by far the safest bet was to make her the daughter of an honest working man. In these days the young girls who went to the popular-priced theaters were not themselves employed to any extent as clerks or stenographers, and they knew more about factory life and the experience of the day laborer and less about the white collar workers than they know to-day. Our heroine must be pure at any cost, or else she must die. There could be no temporizing with the “the wages of sin are death” slogan. In all my experience I never once saw it successfully defied. The heroine must, of course, always marry the hero. Our audiences would not stand for any but a happy ending with love and wealth bestowed upon the girl. This was bad art, but it always seemed to me to be pretty good sense, as the theater to them meant not life as it was but life as they wanted it to be, and the young girl in our audiences who thrilled for an hour over the wealth and luxury and the ideal love that always came to the fictitious character she had for a time exchanged places with had little chance of remaining in this fairyland for long.

3. The Heavy Man.

Always wealthy; the silk hat was his badge of office. In a good melodrama he never reformed, he bit the dust. He was the most absurd thing connected with these old plays. The necessity for his evil plotting was so great that even the most innocent of audiences must have frequently wondered why he was not poisoned at an early age by his own unfortunate disposition. As a matter of fact, one of the principal causes of the death of this form of entertainment was the “Desperate Desmond” cartoons that instructed our public in the absurdity of this stock character.

4. The Heavy Woman.

There were two of her, the haughty lady of wealth and social position, quite naturally the instinctive enemy of our audiences, and the “bad woman” who in these days was spoken of in a hushed whisper. I recall some successful heavy women who had dark hair, but these were always cast in the society women parts. The real bad ones had to be blondes and they averaged a good hundred and sixty pounds.

5. The Soubrette.

A working girl with bad manners and a good heart. Laurette Taylor was one of the best of these I ever saw. This type of part, the real soubrette, has disappeared from our theater, and yet some of the best actresses I have ever known were soubrettes,—Maggie Mitchell, Minnie Palmer, Mrs. Fiske (when she was Minnie Maddern) and a host of others.

6. The Comedian.

Either Jew, Irish or German, the most important member of the company in the old days and the one who drew the largest salary. We might and, as a matter of fact, we frequently did get away with a terrible leading man, but the comedian had to be good.

7. The Light Comedy Boy.

This character was always a humble and faithful friend of the lovers and was always in love with the soubrette. I recall once trying to have this character in love with some one else—but I had to rewrite the play. The audience got too bewildered.

8. The Second Heavy.

He was just a bum, a tool of the villain’s, and as it was usual to kill him along toward the middle of the second act, we never found it necessary to engage a very good actor.

These eight made up the cast and to them we added two or three utility actors to play such “walking parts” as the plot demanded, but no matter what the play these eight characters were always in it. If they hadn’t been I am sure the audience would have demanded their money back.

Scenically, these plays of ours were very elaborate. They were always in four acts and frequently with as many as five scenes in each act. CHINATOWN CHARLIE had twenty-two scenes. The mechanical dexterity demanded in writing a play of this kind was very important and an extremely difficult trick to acquire. Front scenes in the old melodramas were always flat and stupid, just as they are in the musical comedies of to-day. The expert workman let his front scenes run the exact time it took the stage carpenters to set the next scene back of it and not a moment longer, which took experience and care. It was also necessary to climax these scenes and these scene climaxes were the forerunners of the modern “blackout”—some sure-fire “belly-laugh” or bit of heroic bunk that would be sure to bring a yell of delight from the audience to cover the moment in the dark necessary to fly the drop and start the next scene.

After a time I got to be so expert in this that I could give a cue to the audience for a laugh or a yell of approval that would last just long enough to fill in the desired pause. To me the most interesting thing about these old manuscripts of mine are these “audience cues” that would be meaningless to any one who should chance to read them but were a very real and very necessary part of the play.

Just how I could have been quite serious in building these old plays I can’t at this moment quite comprehend, but the fact is that I was, just as every man who is successful in his work must be. Even the priceless line of Nellie, the well-known cloak model, was quite gravely written. Nellie was endeavoring to escape from the attentions of a very evil gentleman who from the start of the play showed signs of paying her attentions that were far from honorable. In the first act he pushed her under a descending elevator in the basement of a department store. In Act II he threw her off Brooklyn Bridge and in the third he bound her to the tracks of the elevated railroad just as a train came thundering along. In the fourth act he climbs in her bedroom window at an early hour of the morning and when both modesty and prudence force her to shrink away from him he looked at her reproachfully and said: “Why do you fear me, Nellie?”