“I saw in yesterday’s Kansas City papers a piece about your new theater. I think your idea is fine! It’s all right! Have you got a part for a beginner who will take anything or everything, but wants to begin? I know I’ve got stuff in me, and I must see New York. Please reply. “Yours anxiously, “LOUISIANA DELACOURT, “P. O. Box 8, Iole, Kansas.” “I think that Louisiana should get a chance to see New York,” Brainard observed. “She might take less than everything then. What do you say?” “Put her down for the college,” laughed Brainard. “She thinks the Idea is fine.” And that is how Miss Louisiana Delacourt, of Iole, Kansas, became the first pupil in the new college of dramatic art, which was not yet founded. When the second mail came in with a large assortment of begging letters and more manuscript plays, Brainard rose in disgust and seized his hat to flee from his own house. “Don’t forget Mrs. Pearmain’s—luncheon at half past one!” the secretary warned. “Confound Mrs. Pearmain!” Brainard muttered. “Just tell her I’ve gone out of town, Ned.” A look of horror spread over the secretary’s handsome face. “It wouldn’t do! She’s to have a lot of important people there to hear about the Idea. She would never forgive you. It would spoil everything at the social end,” the young man pleaded. He had worked for weeks to “start the social business,” as he called it, and thus arouse an interest of a fashionable kind in their undertaking. This luncheon at Mrs. Pearmain’s was to be the brilliant opening of a social campaign that should go hand in hand with the more democratic press campaign. It was unthinkable for Brainard to refuse from whim or shyness or fastidiousness the gracious advances of Society! “I don’t like all this woman business,” Brainard remarked sulkily, laying aside his hat. “Whatever did you get us into it for, Ned? I don’t need their money.” “No, you don’t need their money,” Farson pronounced oracularly, “and that’s just why you’ll get what you do need. You need their influence. You can’t get anything started without the women—not in America. A movement for art in any form couldn’t exist, if the women didn’t take it up. Why, there isn’t any Art in any form in this country, except what the women keep going. So far as literature, drama, and music go, there’s but one sex in America, and it doesn’t wear trousers either!” “Lord!” the young Mæcenus groaned, “I didn’t know that, Ned.” “There’s a good deal you don’t know about America and Americans that you’ll have to learn, if you want to make good in this thing,” the secretary commented severely. “That’s what you need me for—to open your eyes.” “Thanks,” Brainard murmured humbly. “You will find Mrs. Donnie Pearmain the very one to give the right _cachet_ to the movement.”