ambitions proved fickle: he discarded Miss Barrymore and substituted
Miss Colgate for the star part in the piece. Fortunately he had
written but six or eight pages of the first act, so the transfer was
not a deleterious undertaking. He could see no one else in the part;
he could think of no one else as he dreamed of the play's success.
Moreover, Miss Colgate was as pleased as Punch over this flattering
tribute to her magnetism--for the part, as described, was one that
would not "get over" unless created by an actress of pronounced
magnetic appeal--and lost no time in falling deeply in love with the
manly playwright. They were serious-minded, ambitious young people. It
is of small consequence that he was an untried, unskilled dramatist,
and of equally small moment that she was little more than an amateur.
They saw a bright light ahead and trudged steadily toward it, prodding
themselves--and each other--with all the vain-glorious artifices known
to and employed by the young and undefeated. The young man's dramatic
aspirations were somewhat retarded, however, by the fact that he was
so desperately enamoured that he couldn't confine his thoughts to the
play; so the growth of the first act was slow and tortuous. Under
other conditions he would have despaired of ever completing the thing.
As it was, his despair was of an entirely different character and had
to do with the belief that Miss Colgate loved some one else instead of
him.

But even doubt and uncertainty possess virtue in that they often lead
to rashness, sometimes folly. In this case, Mr. Flanders proposed
marriage, albeit he couldn't, for the life of him, see how he was
going to manage on a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. That was
the rashness of it. Miss Colgate attended to the folly. She said she
would marry him if it meant starvation. So there you are.