failed to make a
reference to the business that Maude Adams was doing (for her immense
success was very dear to his heart), and he always commented on his own
strenuous activities. He liked to talk about the things he was doing.

The really intimate Frohman letters were always written by hand on
scraps of paper, and were short, jerky, and epigrammatic. Most of these
were written, or rather scratched, to intimates like James M. Barrie,
Paul Potter, and Haddon Chambers.

As indicated in one of the chapters of this book, Frohman delighted in
caricature. To a few of his friends he would send a humorous cartoon
instead of a letter. He caricatured whatever he saw, whether riding on
trains or eating in restaurants. If he wanted a friend to dine with him
he would sketch a rough head and mark it "Me"; then he would draw
another head and label it "You." Between these heads he would make a
picture of a table, and under it scrawl, "Knickerbocker, Friday, 7
o'clock."

Frohman seldom used pen and ink. Most of his letters were written with
the heavy blue editorial pencil that he liked to use. He wrote an
atrocious hand. His only competitor in this way was his close friend
Barrie. The general verdict among the people who have read the writing
of both men is that Frohman took the palm for illegible chirography.

Frohman could pack a world of meaning into his letters. To a
fellow-manager who had written to Boston to ask if he had seen a certain
actress play, he replied: "No, I have had the great pleasure of _not_
seeing her act."

His letters reflect his moods and throw intimate light on his character.
He would always have his joke. To William Collier, who had sent him a
box for a play that he was doing in New York, he once wrote: "I do not
think I will have any difficulty in finding your theater, although a
great many new theaters have gone up. Many old ones have 'gone up' too."

His swift jugglery with words is always manifest. To Alfred Sutro he
sent this sentence notifying him that his play was to go into rehearsal:
"The die is cast--but not the play."

Through his letters there shines his uncompromising rule of life.
Writing to W. Lestocq, his agent in London, in reference to the English
failure of "Years of Discretion," he said: "It is a failure, and that is
the end of it. You can't get around failure, so we must go on to
something else."

* * *

The number of available Frohman letters is not large. The following,
gathe