long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your
ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like
this:

Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better
than your own (madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus girls are
inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back
to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses
reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their
step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley. The
ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first
sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H.
Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he was.

All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne
and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving pictures
have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp.

Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did, the
profession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look askance at the
players with an eye full of patronizing superiority--and we go home and
practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking
glasses.

Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It
seems to have been divulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalians
and diamond-hungry _loreleis_ they are businesslike folk, students and
ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning real estate, and
conducting their private affairs in as orderly and unsensational a
manner as any of us good citizens who are bound to the chariot wheels of