CONGREVE

Little had happened to mark the greater part of the time that had elapsed since Harry's graduation. For three years he had studied hard for his doctor's degree, and during the fourth year he had been set to teaching English literature to freshmen, which task, on the whole, he accomplished with marked success. But during the fifth year, the year in which we next see him, he was not teaching freshmen, though he was still living in New Haven, and working, according to his own accounts, like a galley slave. The events which led up to this state of things form a matter of some moment in his career.

These began with the production, during his fourth year out of college, of a play of his by the college dramatic association. Or, to be more exact, it really began some months before that, when Harry, leaving a theater one evening after witnessing a poor play, had remarked to his companion of the moment: "I actually believe that I could write a better play than that." To which the friend made the obvious answer, "Why don't you, then?" "I will," replied Harry, and he did.

It was his first venture in that field of composition. In all his literary activities he had never before, to borrow his own phrase, committed dramaturgy. To the very fact that his maiden effort came so late Harry was wont, in later years, to attribute a large measure of his success. His idea was that if he had begun earlier his first results would have been so excruciatingly bad as to discourage him from sustained effort in that direction.

However this may be, the play was judged the best of those submitted in a competition organized by the dramatic association, and was produced by it during the following winter with a very fair amount of success. Nobody could fairly have called it a remarkable play, but neither could any one have been justified in calling it a bad one. Its theme was, apart from its setting, singularly characteristic of the subsequent style of its author and may be said to have struck the tragi-comic note that sounded through all his later work. It concerned the experiences of a struggling young English author, poor, but of gentle birth, who is first seen inveighing against the snobbery, coldness and indifference shown toward him by people of wealth and position, and later, after coming unexpectedly into a peerage and a large fortune, is horrified to find himself forced into displaying the very qualities which he had so fiercely condemned in others. The machinery of the play was somewhat artificial, but the characterization and dramatic interest were skilfully worked out. The dialogue was everywhere delightful and the contrast afforded between the conscientious, introspective sincerity of the young author and the gaily unscrupulous casuistry of his wife was a forecast, if not actually an early example, of his best work.

Harry was never blind to the faults of the play, but he remained convinced that it was good in the main, and, what was more important, retained his interest in dramatic composition. He worked hard during the following spring and summer and at length evolved another play, which he called "Chances" and believed was a great improvement upon his first work. Early in August he sent the play to a New York manager to whom he had obtained an introduction and after a week or two made an appointment with him.

The secret trepidation with which he first entered the office of the great, the redoubtable Leo Bachmann was largely allayed by the appearance of the manager. He was a large flabby man, with scant stringy hair and a not unpleasant smile. He sat heavily back in an office chair and puffed continually at a much-chewed cigar, the ashes of which fell unnoticed and collected in the furrows of his waistcoat. He spoke in a soft thick voice, with a strong German accent. Harry did not see anything particularly terrifying about him.

"Ah, yes, Mr. Vimbourne," said the manager when Harry had made himself known. "You have sent me a play, yes? Ah, here it is.... Unfortunately I have not had time to read it; I am very, very busy just now, but my man Jennings has read it and tells me it is very nice. Very nice, indeed ..." he puffed in ruminative silence for a few seconds. "Could you come back next week, say Friday, Mr. Vimbourne? and we will talk it over. I am sorry to trouble you, but you see I am so very, very busy...."

Harry made another appointment and left, not wholly dissatisfied. He returned, ten days afterward, to his second interview, which was an almost exact replica of the first. He allowed himself to be put off another ten days, but when he returned for the third time and was greeted by precisely the same soft words he was irritated and hardly able to conceal the fact.

"Ah, yes, your play," said the manager, as though he had just heard of it for the first time. "Jennings was speaking to me of it only the other night. I am sorry to say I have not read it yet." He took the manuscript from a pile on his desk and turned over the leaves. "I am sorry—very sorry—I have so little time...."

"I don't believe you, Mr. Bachmann," said Harry.

"Ah?" said the manager, without the slightest apparent interest. "Why not, Mr. Vimbourne?"

"Well, you turned straight to the best scene in it just now, for one thing.... Beside, you wouldn't keep me hanging on this way if you didn't see something in it, and if you see anything in it of course you've read it. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Bachmann, that isn't my idea of business."

Mr. Bachmann's next remark was so unexpected that Harry nearly swooned in his chair. "I read it the day after it came," he said softly.

"Then why on earth didn't you say so in the first place?" stammered Harry.

The manager made no reply for some moments, but sat silently puffing and turning over the pages of Harry's manuscript.

"I like to know people," he murmured at last, very gently and with apparent irrelevance. Harry, however, saw the bearing of the remark and suddenly felt extraordinarily small. He had been rather proud of his little burst of spirit and independence; he now saw that Leo Bachmann had drawn it from him with the ease and certainty of touch with which a musician produces a note from a flute. He wondered, abjectly, how many other self-satisfied young authors had sat where he sat and been played upon by that great puffing mass of pulp.

Bachmann was the next to speak. "I like your play very much, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "It is very nice—some things in it not so good, but on the whole, it is very nice. I think I vill try to produce it, Mr. Vimbourne, but not yet—not till I see how my September plays go. I shall keep yours in reserve, and then, later, we may try it. About the first of November, when the Fifth Avenue crowd comes back to town...." He smiled slightly. "They are the people that vill vant to see it. Not Harlem. Not Brooklyn. The four hundred. Even so," he continued, ruminatively, "even so, I shall not make on it."

This seemed to Harry a good opening for a proposition he had been longing to make since the very first but had never quite dared. "If you want me to put anything up on it, Mr. Bachmann, why—I...."

"No," said Mr. Bachmann gently; "I never do that, I produce my own plays, for my own reasons. I vill pay you a sum, down. And a small royalty, perhaps—after the hundredth performance."

Harry looked up and smiled, and the manager smiled back at him. His smile grew quite broad, almost a laugh, in fact. Then he rose from his chair—the first time Harry had seen him out of it—and clasped Harry's hand between his two large plump ones.

"I think we shall get on very well, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "Very well, indeed. I vill let you know when rehearsals begin. And you must write more—a great deal more. But—vait till after the rehearsals!"

"Yes, I think I understand you," said Harry, laughing. "I'll wait. And I'll come to the rehearsals, too!"

In October the rehearsals actually started, and Harry began to see what he told Mr. Bachmann he thought he understood. Day after day he sat in the dark draughty theater and watched the people on the stage slash and cut and change his carefully constructed dialogue without offering a word of remonstrance. At first the pleasure of seeing his own work take tangible form, on a real professional stage and by the agency of real professional actors more than made up for the loss. Then as the rehearsals went on, he perceived that there was a very real reason for every cut and change, and that the play benefited tremendously thereby. He began to see how acting accomplishes a great deal of what he had always considered the office of dialogue. A dialogue of five speeches, to take a concrete example, on the probable reasons why a certain person did not arrive when he was expected was made unnecessary by one of the characters crossing the stage and looking out of a window at just the right moment and with just the right facial expression.

Harry made no secret of his conviction that his play improved immensely under the care of Bachmann and his people. His attitude was that they knew everything about play-producing and he knew nothing, and that the extraordinary thing was that he had been able to provide them with any dramatic material whatever. He joked about it with the actors and managers, when occasion offered, as callously as if he had been a third person, and rather surprised himself by the light-heartedness he displayed. Whether this was entirely genuine, whether it did not contain elements of a pose, a desire to appear as a man of the theatrical world, a fear of falling into all the usual errors of youthful playwrights, he did not at first ask himself.

One day, about a week before the opening night, he received a jolt that made him look upon himself and his calling in rather a new light. This came through an unexpected agent—none other, indeed, than a woman of the cast, and not the player of the principal female part at that, but a lesser light, Bertha Bensel by name, a plain but pleasant little person of uncertain age. Harry was lunching alone with her and carrying on in what had become his customary style when talking of his play.

"You know," he was saying, "I thought at one time I had written a play, but I haven't, I've written a moving picture show. Everybody is writing movies these days, even those that try to write anything else, which just shows. I'm going regularly into the movie business, after this. Seriously. And I intend to write the real kind of movies, the kind that don't bother about the characters at all, but just dramatize scenery. I shall call things by their proper names, too. Let's see—a Devonshire parsonage is beloved and wooed by a Scotch moor, but turns him down for a Louis Onze chÂteau with a Le NÔtre garden. She discovers, just in time, that his intentions are not honorable, and is rescued by a Montana prairie, who happens along just at the right moment. The situation is still awkward, however, because the parsonage finds that her prairie has a wife living, a New York gambling hell, whom he hates but who won't release him. So the parsonage refuses his disinterested offers and starts life for herself. After various adventures with a South Carolina plantation, an Indian Ocean trawler, an Argentine pampas and the Scala theater at Milan, the poor parsonage ends up in a London sweat shop, to which she is at last discovered by the Scotch moor, who had been looking for her all these years. Embrace. Passed by the national board of censors."

Miss Bensel smiled, but did not seem to see much humor in this foolery. That was due, thought Harry, to the fatigue of her long morning's work, and he determined not to bother her with any more nonsense. The silence which he allowed to ensue, however, was broken by an unexpected remark from his vis-À-vis, who said with a dispassionate air:

"I think, Mr. Wimbourne, you stand in a great danger."

"Danger?"

"Yes, that is, I hope you do. If not, I'm very much disappointed in you."

"Thank you so much, but just how?"

"You're in danger of getting to take your art as lightly as you talk about it. Then you'll be lost, for good. It's a real danger. I've seen the thing happen before, to people of as much talent as you, or nearly so."

Harry looked at her in blank astonishment, and she went on:

"If you go on talking that way about your profession, you'll get to think that way and finally be that way. All roses and champagne—nothing worth while. You may go on writing plays, but they'll get sillier and sillier, even if they get more and more popular. So your life will pass away in frivolity and popularity.... That's not your place in the world, Mr. Wimbourne. You've got talent—perhaps more. You know that? This play, now. I say nothing about the dialogue, because good dialogue is not so rare—though yours is the best I've seen for some time—but how about the rest of it, the story, the ideas? It's good stuff—you know it is."

Harry leaned back in his chair and tapped the table meditatively with a spoon. He had the lack of self-consciousness that enables a person to take blame exactly in the spirit in which it is given, with no alloying mixture of embarrassment or resentment.

"Yes," he said after a while, "I suppose you're right about it. I have a certain responsibility.... I suppose the stuff is good, when all is said and done—though I don't dare to think it can be."

Miss Bensel leaned forward with her elbows on the table and allowed her face to relax into a smile, a curious little smile that did not part her lips but drew down the corners of her mouth.

"That's it—I thought that probably was it! You're so modest you're afraid to take yourself seriously. Well, that's a pretty good fault; I think on the whole it's better than taking yourself too seriously. But don't do it, even so. Take it from me, my dear boy, you can't accomplish anything worth while in this world, anything, whatever it is, unless you take your work seriously—at bottom."

Harry did a good deal of serious thinking on the subject during the rest of the day, and the more he thought about it the more convinced he became that Miss Bensel was right. He thought of Dickens' famous utterance on the subject of being flippant about one's life's work; he thought of the example of Congreve. Congreve, there was an appropriate warning! Congreve, whose life was a duel between the painstaking artist and the polished man-about-town, who never would speak other than lightly of his best work, whose boast and whose shame it was deliberately to stifle the fires of his own genius. Was he, Harry, guilty of something like the pose of Congreve? He thought of his attitude of exaggerated camaraderie with the actors and managers, of his attitude toward his own work; he realized that frivolity had become not merely a pose, but a habit. Was he not, in such doings, following in the steps of Congreve—the man who insisted that the work that made him famous had been written for the sole purpose of whiling away the tedium of convalescence after an illness?

As he watched his own play being enacted before his eyes that afternoon he realized that his work was, in the main, good, and that he had known it all along. He had felt it while he was writing it; Bachmann's astonishingly prompt (as he had since learned it to be) acceptance of it had given conclusive proof of it. If anything further was needed, he had it in the enthusiasm with which the actors played it and spoke of it. Somehow, by some incredible chance, the divine gift had fallen upon him. To belittle that gift, to fail to devote his best efforts to making the most of it, would be to shirk his life's duty.

The third act, upon which most of the work of the afternoon was done, drew to its close. It had been immensely shortened by cuts; Harry was not sorry, though he missed some of what he had thought the best lines in the play. Then the heroine made her final exit, and Harry suddenly realized she had done so without her and the hero's having delivered two little speeches that ought to have come just before; speeches on which he had spent much care and labor. Those two lines had, in fact, contained the whole gist of the play, or at any rate driven home its thesis in a particularly striking way. The point of the play was that living was simply a system of chances, and these speeches made clear the distinction between the wrong kind of chancing, the careless, risking-all kind, whose final result was always ruin, and the sober, intelligent, prayerful kind, as shown in the lives of those who, after careful consideration of all the chances that may affect them, do what they decide is best and await the result with the calmness of a Mohammedan fatalist.

Harry suddenly became imbued with the profound conviction that those two speeches were absolutely necessary to the understanding of his play. He hastily read over the last half of the act in his typewritten copy, and failed to see how any spectator could catch the true meaning of the work without them. Well, here was a chance to show how seriously he could take his art! The whole affair took on a new and strange momentousness; he stood at this instant, he told himself, at the very turning-point of his artistic career. He would not take the wrong road, cost him what it might; he would not be found wanting.

Bachmann was in the theater, sitting in the back row of the orchestra, as was his custom. Harry determined to go straight to him and ask him to put those lines in again. As he walked up the aisle he thought feverishly of the tremendous import of this interview. Bachmann would refuse at first, he knew that well enough. Bachmann would not easily be convinced by the opinion of an inexperienced scribbler. But Harry was determined not to be beaten; he was prepared to fight, prepared to make a scene, if necessary; prepared to sacrifice the production of his play, if it came to that. He could see Bachmann's slow smile as he reminded him of practical considerations. "Your contract?" "Damn the contract," Harry would reply. "Ha, ha! I've got the whip hand of you there, Mr. Bachmann! I can afford to break all the contracts I want!" "And your career?" retorted Bachmann, with a sneer, but turning ever so slightly pale. "Ho! my career! What the devil do I care for my career! I choose to write for all time, not for my own! I...."

"Vell, Mr. Vimbourne," Bachmann, the live, fleshly Bachmann, was saying in a startlingly mild and everyday tone of voice, "what can I do for you?"

"Oh ... I just wanted to speak to you about this last scene," said Harry, trying hard to keep his voice steady. "They've cut out two lines just before Miss Cleves' exit that I think ought to be kept."

"Let's see."

Harry handed him the manuscript and anxiously watched him as he glanced rapidly over the pages. "They're pretty important lines, really. They explain a lot; I'm afraid people won't understand...." He could feel his voice weakening and his knees trembling, but his determination remained.

"Burchard!" Bachmann bellowed, in the general direction of the stage.

"Yes!"

"What about those two speeches before Miss Cleves' exit?"

There was a short and rather flurried silence from the stage, after which the voice of Burchard again emerged:

"Miss Cleves said she couldn't make her exit on that line."

"Where is she? Tell her to come back and try it."

The battle was won without a shot being fired. Harry, almost literally knocked flat by the surprise and relief of the moment, sank into the nearest seat. Bachmann got up and lumbered off toward the stage; Harry leaned his head against the back of his chair and gave himself over to an outburst of internal mirth, at his own expense.

He raised his eyes again to the stage. Curiously enough, the first person his glance fell on was Miss Bensel, with her trim little figure and humorously plain face. It seemed to him she was smiling out at him, with a mocking little smile that drew down the corners of her mouth.

Everybody knows what happened to the play "Chances"; its history is a page of the American stage. Much has been said and written about it; it has been called a landmark, a stepping-stone, a first ditch, a guiding light, a moral victory, a glorious failure, a promising defeat and various similar things so often that people are tired of the very name of it. What actually happened to it can be told in a few words; it was well received, but not largely attended. It was withdrawn near the end of its fourth week.

The critics were unanimous in praising it. Its dialogue was hailed as the ideal dialogue of contemporary comedy. The characterization, the humor of the lines, the universality of the theme, its wonderfully logical and convincing development all received their due meed of praise. It was compared to the comedies of Clyde Fitch, of Oscar Wilde, of Sheridan, and of Congreve—yes, actually Congreve! Harry smiled when he read that, and renewed his resolution never to let the comparison apply in a personal way. But to be seriously compared to Congreve, not Congreve the man but Congreve the author—! The thought made him fairly dizzy.

But what took the eye of the critics, the best and soberest of them, that is, more than anything else was the mixture of the humorous and serious shown in the choice of the theme and its development. "To treat the element of humor," wrote one critic, "not as a colored glass through which to look at all life, as in farce, nor as a refreshing contrast to its serious side, as in the 'comic relief' of a host of plays from the Elizabethans down to the present day, but as part and parcel of the very essence of life itself, co-existent with its solemnity, inseparable from its difficulty, companion and friend to its unsolvable mystery; to put people in such a mood that they can laugh at the greatest things in their own lives, neither bitterly nor to give themselves Dutch courage, but for the pure, life giving, illuminating exaltation of laughing—this, we take it, is the whole essence and mission of comedy. And this—we say it boldly and in no spirit of empty flattery—is the type of comedy shown in Mr. Wimbourne's play."

It is not hard to see how such words should bring joy to the heart of Harry and smiles of admiration and respect to the faces of his friends, from Leo Bachmann right up to Aunt Selina. But they did not bring people to the theater. For the first three performances the attendance was satisfactory; then it began steadily to fall off and by the end of the first week it became merely a question of how long it could survive.

Leo Bachmann was, curiously enough, the least affected of all the theater crowd by the poor success of the work. He viewed the discouraging box office reports with an untroubled smile, and cheerfully began rehearsals for a new play. "Never you mind, my boy," he told Harry, "I knew I should not make money off your play. I told you so in the beginning. Never you mind! That is not your fault. It's just the way things go. I have only one word to say to you, and that is—write!" Even in his discouragement Harry could not help feeling that Mr. Bachmann was strangely calm and cheerful.

Within a week from the end of the play's run a curious thing happened. A visiting English dramatist and critic, a confirmed self-advertiser, but a writer and thinker of unquestioned brilliancy, and a wit, withal, of international reputation, was greatly struck by the play and wrote an unsolicited letter about it which appeared in the pages of a leading daily.

"No more striking proof," wrote this self-appointed defender of Harry, "could be offered of the consanguinal intellectual stupidity of the Anglo-Saxon race than I received at a performance of Mr. Harold Wimbourne's play 'Chances' at the —— Theater last night. For the first time during my stay in this country as I looked over the almost empty stalls and realized that this, incomparably the best play running in New York, was also the worst attended, I could have fancied myself actually in my own country.

"What are the lessons or qualities in Mr. Wimbourne's play which the American people cannot stomach? I suppose, when all is said and done, he has committed the unpardonable offense of giving them a little of their own medicine. He has rammed down their throats some few corollaries of the Calvinistic doctrines for which the ancestors of the very people who stay away from his play sailed an uncharted sea, conquered a wilderness, and spilt their blood to champion against a usurping power. The Pilgrim fathers founded the United States of America in order to publish the greatness of God and the littleness of man. Their descendants either ignore or condemn one of their number because he does not extol the greatness of man and the littleness of God. Because Mr. Wimbourne ventures to show, in a very mild—if very artistic and compelling way—how slight a hold man has on the moving force of life, God, the universe, a group of atoms—whatever you choose to call the world—he becomes a pariah. He has escaped easily after his first offense, but it will go hard with the Anglo-Saxon character if he is not stoned in the streets after the next one. America is a great and rich country; what does it care about religion or philosophy or art or any of that poppycock? Serious and devout thinking simply are not done; it has become as great a solecism to mention the name of the Deity in society—except as the hero of a humorous story—as to talk about Kant or Hegel. Americans have lost interest in that sort of stuff; they do not need it. Why, now that they have become physically strong, should they bother about the unsubstantial kind of strength known as moral to which they were forced to resort when they were physically weak? Why, having become mountain lions, should they continue to practise what upheld them when they were fieldmice?

"Of course I should not have made such a point in favor of a play if it were not, technically and artistically speaking, a very good play. The truth when it is badly spoken hardly merits more attention than if it were not spoken at all. But 'Chances' is as beautifully constructed as it was conceived; it is a play that I should be proud to have written myself. Its technical perfections have already been praised, even by that class of people least calculated to appreciate them; I mean the critics. I will, therefore, mention but one small example, which I believe, in the presence of so many greater beauties, has been overlooked; namely, the short dialogue near the end of the first act in which Frances, in perhaps half a page of conversation with the man to whom she is then engaged, realizes that her engagement is empty, that she has no heart for the man, that a new way of looking at love has transcended her life;—realizes all this, and betrays it to the audience without in the smallest degree giving herself away to the man with whom she is talking or saying a word in violation of the probability of their conversation. Such a feat in dramaturgy is, perhaps, appreciable only to those who have tried to write plays themselves. Still, whom does that not include?

"But I do not expect Americans to appreciate artistic perfection any more than I expect Englishmen to. The shame, the disgrace to Americans in not appreciating this play lies in the fact that it is fundamentally American; American in its characters, in its setting, and above all in its motive principles, which are the principles to which America owes its very existence."

Such opinions, appearing over a famous signature, could not but revive interest and talk about its subject, and the play experienced a slight boom during the last few days of its existence. Its run, indeed, would have been extended but for the fact that Bachmann had made all the arrangements for its successor and advertised the date of its appearance. Altogether the incident tended to show that if the play was a failure it was at least a dynamic failure, indicative of future success.

Harry was as little elated by the praise of the foreigner as he was cast down by the condemnation of his countrymen. His demeanor all along, ever since the day of his interview with Miss Bensel, had been characterized by an observant calmness. He dissuaded as many of his relations and friends as he could from being present at the first performance of the play and ignored those who insisted on being there. He himself occupied an obscure seat in the gallery and listened with the greatest attention to the comments of those about him. He thereby began to form an idea of what the general public thought of his work; knowledge which, as he himself realized, would be of inestimable value if he could put it to use in his next play.

A letter Harry wrote to his Uncle Giles just after the play was taken off expresses his state of mind at this time. "'Chances' has gone by the board," he wrote; "that splendid American institution, the Tired Business Man, would have none of it, and it has ceased to be Drama and has become merely Literature. But I have learned a lot during its brief existence, and this knowledge I shall, please God, make use of if I ever write another play. Which is a mere figure of speech, as I have started one already.

"I have learned the point of view of the Tired Business Man. That was what I wanted to know from the very first—not what the critics thought. They could do no more than say it was good, and I knew that already. And what the T. B. M. said was substantially, that my play was nice enough, but that it had no punch. I don't know whether you recognize that expression or not; it is one of those vivid American slang words that English people are so fascinated by. People thought the play wasn't interesting enough, and that is the simple truth about it. Therefore it wasn't a good play. For my idea is that to be really good a play must hold the stage, at least at the time it is written. And if we are ever going to build up such a thing as the 'American drama' our critics are continually bellowing about, we've got to begin with our foundations. We can't create a full-fledged literary drama and then go to work and make the people like it; we've got to begin with what the people like and build up our drama on that. That's the way all the great 'dramas' of history have grown up—the Greek, the French, the Spanish and the Elizabethan; and it is interesting to notice that the drama that came nearest to being the product of a mere literary class, the French, is the weakest of the lot and is standing the test of time worst of them all.

"I may never write a more successful play than 'Chances'; I may never get another play on the stage at all. But one thing I am sure of; I shall never offer another play to the public without being convinced that it is a better stage play than 'Chances.'"

Of course that a mere boy, fresh from college, with no practical experience of the stage whatever, should get a play produced at all was an unusual and highly gratifying thing. Harry became quite a lion that autumn, in a small way. He remained in New York till after the play was taken off, living with the James Wimbournes, and was the guest of honor at one or two of Aunt Cecilia's rather dull but eminently important dinners. He became the object of the attention of reporters, and also of that section of metropolitan literati who live in duplex apartments and wear strings of pearls in their hair and can always tell Schubert from Schumann. He was especially delighted with these, and determined some day to write a play or a novel portraying the inner side of their painstaking spirituality.

He saw a good deal of James during those weeks; more than he had seen of him since their college days. James had been rather sparing of his week-end visits to New Haven since moving to New York; Harry noticed that. He was sorry, for he now found James a great help and stimulus. He discovered that a walk or a motor ride with James between the hours of five and seven would obliterate the effects of the caviar-est of luncheons and the pinkest of teas and give him strength with which to face evenings in the company of people who appeared unable even to perspire anything less exalted than pure Pierian fluid.

"Well, it's nice to meet some one who doesn't smell of Russian cigarettes," he observed one day as he took his place in the long, low, slightly wicked-looking machine in which James whiled away most of his leisure moments. "Do you know, sometimes I actually rush into the nursery at Aunt Cecilia's and kiss the youngest and bread-and-butteryest child there, just to get the Parnassian odors out of my lungs. Next to a rather slobby child, though, I prefer the society of an ex-All-American quarter-back."

"Half," said James.

"Oh, were you? Well, you don't smell of anything Æsthetic-er than the camphor balls you put that coat away for the summer in.... James, if you go round another corner at eighty miles an hour I shall leap out and telephone for a policeman!"

"Oh, that's all right. They all know me, anyway. They know I don't take risks."

"Hm.... Well, it's all over for me next week, thank Heaven. I'm going back to Aunt Selina and Sunday night suppers, and I shall be glad!"

"Well, I will say," said James slowly and carefully, with the air of one determined to do the most meticulous justice, "that you have kept your head through it all pretty well."

"Oh, it's not hard, when you come right to it," said Harry, laughing. "Of course there are moments when I wonder if I'm not really greater than Shakespeare. And it does seem funny to realize that the rising genius, the person people are all talking about, and poor little Me are the same. But then I remember what a failure my play was, and shrivel into the poor graduate student.... After I've written a successful play, though, I won't answer for myself. And after I've written 'Hamlet,' as I mean to some day, I shall be simply unbearable. You won't own me then."

"Watch-chain round your neck?" suggested James.

"Oh, worse than that—diamond bracelets! And corsets—if necessary. I saw a man wearing both the other day, I really did."

"A man?"

"Well, an actor. That's the sort of thing they run to now-a-days. Long hair and general sloppiness are quite out of date—among the really ultra ones, that is."

"Well," said James, "I give you permission to be as ultra as you like, after you've written 'Hamlet.'"

"That helps, of course. I daresay I'm lacking in proper seriousness, but it seems to me that if the choice were offered me, right now, between being the author of 'Hamlet' and being also an ultra, and not writing 'Hamlet' and staying as I am, I would choose the latter. I don't know what my point of view may be at some future time, but that's what it is now, or at least I think it is. And after all, nobody can get nearer the truth than saying what he thinks his point of view at any given moment is, can he, James?"