It is harder for a table or chair to behave naturally on the stage than for a camel to be free and easy in a needle’s eye, or for Mr. Rockefeller to get into Heaven (or Hell?) with the money.

What can be more pathetic than the spectacle of a helpless young chair or table or settee starting on a stage career shining with gilt varnish and high ambition to reflect in art’s mirror the drawing-room manners of the furniture of real life.

Mlle. Fauteuil (that is her stage name, in private life she is just plain Sofa) is fresh, charming and of the best manufacture. She appears nightly in a Broadway theater, yet she has attracted no attention. She has received no press notices.

Certainly this is from no lack of charm on her part. Her legs are delightful. In the contemplation of their gilded curves, one scarcely notices that she has no arms or that her back is slightly curved, and her upholstery, a brocade of the season before last.

In a hushed papiÈr-mÂchÉ voice the property man told me the story of Mlle. Fauteuil’s persecution—how, at the first rehearsal with scenery, she occupied a perfectly proper position between the center table and the bay window, how the Leading Lady insisted on her being moved as she obstructed that superior person’s path when, after writing the letter, she crosses to the window to see if her Husband is in the garden.

Mlle. Fauteuil was then transferred to a station between the table and the fire-place. This was all right, until the scene between the Husband and Wife, when the Husband walks back and forth (quickly up stage and slowly down stage), between the table and the fire-place.

This time it was not a case of politely requesting the intervention of the stage-manager.

Poor mangled Fauteuil! When she was picked up from the orchestra pit where he had thrown her it was found that two of her rungs were fractured and her left castor was broken clean off at the ankle.

After half a day in the hospital without either anesthetics, flowers or press notices, she reappeared on the left side of the stage, between the center table and the safe. Here she was conspicuous and happy until it was found that the Erring Son in his voyage from the window to the safe, was compelled to take a difficult step to one side to avoid the fauteuil.

Bandied from right to left, up stage and down stage, at last Mlle. Fauteuil landed in her present obscure position, to the right of the stairway pillar, where, though miserably obscure, she interferes with nobody’s stage business.

In the interior set as now played there is only one chair with a speaking part—this is, the Jacobean chair on which the leading man leans when talking to the ingÉnue. In the first act, it faces left so that he may show his favorite profile. In the second act, the chair is reversed in order that the audience may enjoy his more popular and extensively photographed left profile.

The moral of this story is that the furniture on the stage must never appear more intelligent than the actors.