Had I known as much in those days as I now know of the enormous difficulties ahead of me it is possible that I might have feared them, but at the time my confidence was more developed than my prudence and I had no fear at all. This is, of course, the usual attitude of youth. The obstacles ahead that seem like mountains to the experience of middle age are only mole hills to a young man of twenty odd who quite expects to leap over them without a change of stride. Yet I doubt if any undertaking in the world is any more difficult than that of one who elects to make a living as a dramatist. He must win his place and then he must hold it, and of the two the last is really the most difficult. The late Charles Kline told me just before his death that the most pitiful thing in the world was a playwright who had written a big success and learned enough of the difficulties of doing it to feel absolutely convinced that there wasn’t the slightest chance of his ever being able to do it again. Every young playwright must put up with a number of things that cut deep into a sensitive nature and leave scars that never quite die away. Many men and women of talent, who might have developed into fine writers for the theater find themselves too sensitive for the harsh contacts and give up in despair. The hours of waiting in managers’ offices, ignored and unwelcome, the contemptuous acceptance of plays to be read that are ultimately glanced over by an office boy and scornfully rejected, are all a part of the game. I took one of my first plays to the Frohman office. What happened to it there was, or at least I thought it was, a matter of life or death to me. I had no money at all and during the five weeks I was waiting for a verdict I sold what few clothes I had left, piece by piece, to pay my three dollars a week room rent and spent thirty cents a day for food. At last I was ushered into the presence of the play reader, later one of the great men of the theater, who met me with this encouraging speech: “You are,” he said, “a strong and husky young man, with, so I have heard, some reputation as an athlete. Why don’t you take this play of yours and see how far you can throw it?” This was hardly a tactful rejection, and as it turned out rather a silly one, as the play in question some years later made a very reasonable success. One must be prepared for this sort of thing and resolute enough to thrive on it, as success very rarely comes upon a young playwright very suddenly. It doesn’t sneak up behind one and thrust fame and fortune into one’s lap, fame and fortune being very timid birds, more likely to fall into the lap of the one who goes out after them with a gun than to the dreamer who sits at home and waits patiently. In my experience patient waiting never got anybody anything. All the prizes worth having are for the daring—the one who sits and waits never got anything—except fat.