though we were deaf to the appeal of
these young creatures, claiming their share of the joy of life,
flinging out into the dingy city their desires and aspirations after
unknown realities, their unutterable longings for companionship and
pleasure. Their very demand for excitement is a protest against the
dullness of life, to which we ourselves instinctively respond.

CHAPTER IV

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS

To the preoccupied adult who is prone to use the city street as a mere
passageway from one hurried duty to another, nothing is more touching
than his encounter with a group of children and young people who are
emerging from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon
them. They look up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing
it and quite unable to determine the direction of home. From a tangle
of "make believe" they gravely scrutinize the real world which they
are so reluctant to reenter, reminding one of the absorbed gaze of a
child who is groping his way back from fairy-land whither the story
has completely transported him.

"Going to the show" for thousands of young people in every industrial
city is the only possible road to the realms of mystery and romance;
the theater is the only place where they can satisfy that craving for
a conception of life higher than that which the actual world offers
them. In a very real sense the drama and the drama alone performs for
them the office of art as is clearly revealed in their blundering
demand stated in many forms for "a play unlike life." The theater
becomes to them a "veritable house of dreams" infinitely more real
than the noisy streets and the crowded factories.

This first simple demand upon the theater for romance is closely
allied to one more complex which might be described as a search for
solace and distraction in those moments of first awakening from the
glamour of a youth's interpretation of life to the sterner realities
which are thrust upon his consciousness. These perceptions which
inevitably "close around" and imprison the spirit of youth are perhaps
never so grim as in the case of the wage-earning child. We can all
recall our own moments of revolt against life's actualities, our
reluctance to admit that all life was to be as unheroic and uneventful
as that which we saw about us, it was too unbearable that "this was
all there was" and we tried every possible avenue of escape. As we
made an effort to believe, in spite of what we saw