"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 America," said Frohman. "Most Americans think that the actors and actresses write their own parts. I was on the Long Branch boat the other day and met a well-known Empire first-nighter. 'What are you going to give us next season, Frohman?' he said. "'I open with a little thing by Sardou,' I replied. "'Sardou!' he cried. 'Who in thunder is Sardou?' "All the same," Frohman continued, "I mean to be a playwright. Didn't Lester Wallack write 'Rosedale' and 'The Veteran'? Didn't Augustin Daly make splendid adaptations of German farces? Doesn't Belasco turn out first-class dramas? Then why not I? I mean to learn the game. Don't give me away, but watch my progress in play-making as we jog along through life." He got his first tip from Pinero. "When I have sketched out a play," observed the author of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," "I go and live among the characters." Frohman had no characters of his own, but he held in his brain a fabulous store of other people's plays. And whenever they had a historical or a literary origin he ran these origins to their lair. At Ferney, on the Lake of Geneva, he cared nothing about Voltaire; he wanted to see the place where the free-thinkers gathered in A. M. Palmer's production of "Daniel Rochat." At Geneva he was not concerned with Calvin, but with memories of a Union Square melodrama, "The Geneva Cross." At Lyons he expected the ghosts of _Claude Melnotte_ and _Pauline_ to meet him at the station. In Paris he allowed Napoleon to slumber unnoticed in the Invalides while he hunted the Faubourg Saint-Antoine for traces of "The Tale of Two Cities," and the Place de la Concorde for the site of the guillotine on which _Sidney Carton_ died, and the Latin Quarter haunts of _Mimi_ and _Musette_, and the Bal Bullier where _Trilby_ danced, and the Concert des Ambassadeurs where _Zaza_ bade her lover good-by.