r.

"What are you doing here, Charley?" asked Goodwin.

"I am casting a new play, and came here to get some inspiration. Good
night," was the reply. With that he walked out.

* * *

There was one great secret in Charles Frohman's life. It is natural that
it should center about the writing of a play; it is natural, too, that
this most intimate of incidents in the career of the great manager
should be told by his devoted friend and colleague of many years, Paul
Potter.

Here it is as set down by Mr. Potter:

We had hired a rickety cab at the Place Saint-Francois in Lausanne, and
had driven along the lake of Geneva to Morges, where, sitting on the
terrace of the Hotel du Mont Blanc, we were watching the shore of Savoy
across the lake, and the gray old villages of Thonon and Evian, and the
mountains, rising ridge upon ridge, behind them. And Frohman, being in
lyric mood, fell to quoting "The Blue Hills Far Away," for Owen
Meredith's song was one of the few bits of verse that clung in his
memory.

"Odd," said he, relapsing into prose, "that a chap should climb hill
after hill, thinking he had reached his goal, and should forever find
the blue hills farther and farther away."

While he was ruminating the clouds lifted, and there, in a gap of the
hills, was the crest of Mont Blanc, with its image of Napoleon lying
asleep in the snow.

I have seen Frohman in most of the critical moments of his life, but I
never saw him utterly awe-stricken till then.

"Gee," said he, at length, "what a mountain to climb!"

"It is sixty miles away," I ventured to suggest.

"Well," he remarked, "I'll climb it some day. As John Russell plastered
the Rocky Mountains with 'The City Directory,' so I'll hang a shingle
from the top of Mont Blanc: 'Ambition: a comedy in four acts by Charles
Frohman.'" And as we went home to Ouchy he told me the secret desire of
his heart.

He wanted to write a play.

"Isn't it enough to be a theatrical manager?" I asked.

"No," said he, "a theatrical manager is a joke. The public thinks he
spends his days in writing checks and his nights in counting the
receipts. Why, when I wanted to become a depositor at the Union Bank in
London, the cashier asked me my profession. 'Theatrical manager,' I
replied. 'Humph!' said the cashier, taken aback. 'Well, never mind, Mr.
Frohman; we'll put you down as 'a gentleman.'"

"But is a playwright," I asked, "more highly reputed than a theatrical
manager?"

"Not in