d.

Another winter had passed before we sat side by side on the terrace of
the Cafe Napolitain.

"I have asked Harry Pettitt, the London melodramatist," Frohman said,
"to write me a play. 'I warn you, Frohman,' he replied, 'that I have
only one theme--the Persecuted Woman.' Dion Boucicault, who was
present, said, 'Add the Persecuted Girl.' Joseph Jefferson was with us,
and Jefferson remarked, 'Add the Persecuted Man.' So was Henry Irving,
who said: 'Pity is the trump card; but be Aristotelian, my boy; throw in
a little Terror; with Pity I can generally go through a season, as with
'Charles the First' or 'Olivia'; with Terror and Pity combined I am
liable to have something that will outlast my life." And Irving
mentioned "The Bells" and "The Lyons Mail."

"But who will write you your Terror and Pity?" I asked Frohman.

"If Terror means 'thrill,'" said Frohman, "I can count on Belasco and
Gillette. If Pity means 'sympathy,' the Englishmen do it pretty well. So
does Fitch. So do the French, who used to be masters of the game."

"You don't expect," I said, "to pick up another 'Two Orphans,' a second
'Ticket of Leave Man'?"

"I'm not such a fool," said Frohman. "But I've got hold of something now
that will help me to feed my stock company in New York." And off we went
with Dillingham to see "The Girl from Maxim's" at the Nouveautes.

When we got home to the Ritz Frohman discussed the play after his
manner: "Do you know," he said, "I find the element of pity quite as
strongly developed in these French farces as in the Ambigu melodramas.
The truant husband leaves home, goes out for a good time, gets buffeted
and bastinadoed for his pains, and when the compassionate audience says,
'He has had enough; let up,' he comes humbly home to the bosom of his
family and is forgiven. Where can you find a more human theme than
that?"

"Then you hold," said I, "that even in a French farce the events should
be reasonable?"

"I wouldn't buy one," he replied, "if I didn't consider its basis
thoroughly human. Dion Boucicault told me long ago that farce, like
tragedy, must be founded on granite. 'Farce, well done,' said he, 'is
the most difficult form of dramatic composition. That is why, if
successful, it is far the most remunerative.'"

Years went by. The stock company was dead. "Charles Frohman's Comedians"
had disappeared. The "stars" had supplanted them. Frohman was at the
zenith of his career. American papers called him "the Na