It is quite simple, after all. We have only to go back a year to get to the bottom of the matter. Miss Fairweather and Mr. Flanders were fellow lodgers in a boarding-house not far removed from Times Square. She was playing a small part in one of the Broadway theatres and was known on the programme as Amy Colgate, the customary sop to "family feelings" causing her to abandon her own name during the neophytic period of her career. This was a temporary concession, however; she intended to make the family name famous as soon as she got a "part" that would give her a real chance. Flanders was on the newspaper, but his aspirations were quite as lofty as any one's: he was writing a play. He had already written two novels, both of which remained unpublished. At the outset, his play was intended for Miss Barrymore, but after the second week of his acquaintance with the attractive Miss Colgate his ambitions proved fickle: he discarded Miss Barrymore and substituted Miss Colgate for the star part in the piece. Fortunately he had written but six or eight pages of the first act, so the transfer was not a deleterious undertaking. He could see no one else in the part; he could think of no one else as he dreamed of the play's success. Moreover, Miss Colgate was as pleased as Punch over this flattering tribute to her magnetism--for the part, as described, was one that would not "get over" unless created by an actress of pronounced magnetic appeal--and lost no time in falling deeply in love with the manly playwright. They were serious-minded, ambitious young people. It is of small consequence that he was an untried, unskilled dramatist, and of equally small moment that she was little more than an amateur. They saw a bright light ahead and trudged steadily toward it, prodding themselves--and each other--with all the vain-glorious artifices known to and employed by the young and undefeated. The young man's dramatic aspirations were somewhat retarded, however, by the fact that he was so desperately enamoured that he couldn't confine his thoughts to the play; so the growth of the first act was slow and tortuous. Under other conditions he would have despaired of ever completing the thing. As it was, his despair was of an entirely different character and had to do with the belief that Miss Colgate loved some one else instead of him. But even doubt and uncertainty possess virtue in that they often lead to rashness, sometimes folly. In this case, Mr. Flanders proposed marriage, albeit he couldn't, for the life of him, see how he was going to manage on a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. That was the rashness of it. Miss Colgate attended to the folly. She said she would marry him if it meant starvation. So there you are.