The spirit of these plays captivated my fancy at that time and elevated me into a world of unreality which unfortunately fell in with the wildest of my youthful imaginings. Love, as I saw it here set forth in all those gorgeous or sentimental trappings, was the only kind of love worth while. Fortune also, gilded as only the melodramatic stage can gild it and as shown nightly by Mr. Frohman everywhere in America, was the only type of fortune worth while. To be rich, elegant, exclusive, as in the world of Frohman and Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinero! According to what I saw here, love and youth were the only things worth discussing or thinking about. The splendor of the Orient, the social flare of New York, London and Paris, the excited sex-imaginings of such minds as Dumas junior, Oscar Wilde, then in his heyday, Jones, Pinero and a number of other current celebrities, seemed all to be built around youth and undying love. The dreary humdrum of actual life was carefully shut out from these pieces; the simple delights of ordinary living, if they were used at all, were exaggerated beyond sensible belief. And elsewhere—not here in St. Louis, but in the East, New York, London, Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg—were all the things that were worth while. If I really wanted to be happy I must eventually go to those places, of course. There were the really fine clothes and the superior personalities (physically and socially), and vice and poverty (painted in such peculiar colors that they were always divinely sad or repellent) existed only in those great cities. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXX