into a
rouge and talcum salesman. He falls in love with Sylvia, not knowing her
as Sylvia, of course, but only as the girl up-stairs, a poor little
wretch to whom in the goodness of his heart, he is giving singing
lessons. And she falls in love with him, knowing him neither as Dick
Benham, nor as the successful composer (because his authorship of the
musical comedy has been kept a secret from her), but only as a poor
struggling musician. Poor Dick's affections are temporarily led astray
by the mercenary seductions of the leading lady in his opera, who has
learned the secret of his true identity and vast wealth, and means to
marry him under the cloak of disinterested affection. He gets bad advice
from his poet friend, too, who has dishonorable designs on the girl
up-stairs and so warns Dick against throwing himself away on a nobody,
of, possibly, doubtful virtue. It is, of course, essential to Sylvia
that Dick should ask her to marry him before he learns who she really
is, in order that she may be sure it isn't for her wealth that he is
seeking her.

This was the general lie of the land, though the thing was complicated,
of course, by minor intrigues, as for instance in the first act, when
Minim, the uncle, came to inquire of the successful composer what his
terms would be for introducing a song into his opera, extolling the
merits of Minim's newest brand of liquid face-powder. Then there was the
comic detective, whom Sylvia's frantic father had given the job of
finding her, and who, considering that he was the typical idiot
detective of musical comedy, came unaccountably close to doing it.

Then in the second act, there was the confusion produced by the fact
that Dick and his poet friend gave a midnight party on the roof, unaware
of the fact that Sylvia made it a practise, during these hot nights, to
crawl out from her attic, on to this same roof and sleep there. And on
this particular night, she had invited her six bachelor-girl friends,
who were in her confidence, to come and share its hospitalities with
her. The mutual misunderstandings, by this time piled mountain high,
were projected into the third act by the not entirely unprecedented
device of a mask ball in the palatial Fifth Avenue mansion of Sylvia's
father, in celebration of her return home--a ball whose invitation list
was precisely coincident, even down to the detective, with the persons
who had appeared in the first two acts. One minute before the last