nterest of it was based;
and Montague strove to analyze this idea and formulate it to himself.
There are certain life principles-one might call them moral
axioms--which are the result of the experience of countless ages of the
human race, and upon the adherence to which the continuance of the race
depends. And here was an audience by whom all these principles
were--not questioned, nor yet disputed, nor yet denied--but to whom the
denial was the axiom, something which it would be too banal to state
flatly, but which it was elegant and witty to take for granted. In this
audience there were elderly people, and married men and women, and
young men and maidens; and a perfect gale of laughter swept through it
at a story of a married woman whose lover had left her when he got
married:--

"She must have been heartbroken," said the leading lady.

"She was desperate," said the leading man, with a grin.

"What did she do?" asked the lady "Go and shoot herself?"

"Worse than that," said the man. "She, went back to her husband and had
a baby!"

But to complete your understanding of the significance of this play,
you must bring yourself to realize that it was not merely a play, but a
kind of a play; it had a name--a "musical comedy"--the meaning of which
every one understood. Hundreds of such plays were written and produced,
and "dramatic critics" went to see them and gravely discussed them, and
many thousands of people made their livings by travelling over the
country and playing them; stately theatres were built for them, and
hundreds of thousands of people paid their money every night to see
them. And all this no joke and no nightmare--but a thing that really
existed. Men and women were doing these things--actual flesh-and-blood
human beings.

Montague wondered, in an awestricken sort of way, what kind of human
being it could be who had flourished the cane and made the grimaces in
that play. Later on, when he came to know the "Tenderloin," he met this
same actor, and he found that he had begun life as a little Irish
"mick" who lived in a tenement, and whose mother stood at the head of
the stairway and defended him with a rolling-pin against a policeman
who was chasing him. He had discovered that he could make a living by
his comical antics; but when he came home and told his mother that he
had been offered twenty dollars a week by a show manager, she gave him
a licking for lying to her. Now he was making three thousand doll