know just how I could make up
for him. And the play is so native, so American, that it will go like
wildfire."

The author heard these words with a swelling heart. He did not speak,
for he could not. He sat still, watching the actor as he paced to and
fro, histrionically rapt in his representation of an actor who had just
taken a piece from a young dramatist. "If you can realize that part as
you've sketched it to me," he said, finally, "I will play it
exclusively, as Jefferson does Rip Van Winkle. There are immense
capabilities in the piece. Yes, sir; that thing will run for years!"

"Of course," Maxwell found voice to say, "there is one great defect in
it, from the conventional point of view." The actor stopped and looked
at him. "There's no love-business."

"We must have that. But you can easily bring it in."

"By the head and shoulders, yes. But I hate love-making on the stage,
almost as much as I do dying. I never see a pair of lovers beyond the
footlights without wanting to kill them." The actor remained looking at
him over his folded arms, and Maxwell continued, with something like a
personal rancor against love-making, while he gave a little, bitter
laugh, "I might have it somehow that Haxard had killed a pair of
stage-lovers, and this was what Greenshaw had seen him do. But that
would have been justifiable homicide."

The actor's gaze darkened into a frowning stare, as if he did not quite
make out this kind of fooling. "All the world loves a lover," he said,
tentatively.

"I don't believe it does," said Maxwell, "except as it's stupid, and
loves anything that makes it laugh. It loves a comic lover, and in the
same way it loves a droll drunkard or an amusing madman."

"We shall have to have some sort of love-business," the actor returned,
with an effect of leaving the right interpretation of Maxwell's peculiar
humor for some other time. "The public wants it. No play would go
without it. You can have it subordinate if you like, but you have got
to have it. How old did you say Haxard was?"

"About fifty. Too old for a lover, unless you could make him in love
with some one else's wife, as he has one of his own already. But that
wouldn't do."

The actor looked as if he did not know why it would not do, but he said,
"He could have a daughter."

"Yes, and his daughter could have a lover. I had thought of something of
that kind, and of bringing in their ill-fated passion as an element of
the tragedy. We cou