Being rather more regular in theatergoing than my friend, I failed to make any complete identification with anybody on the stage, but I was also somewhat depressed. The saintly old lady in the play had spoken of "the tinkling laughter of tiny tots" and it made me reflect on the imperfections of life. It did not seem to me at the time as if any of the children who live in the flat next door ever really tinkle. A week later I saw _Hamlet_ and the effect was diametrically opposite. Everything in the play tended to make life seem more cheerful. He was too, too solid in flesh, also, and in many other respects he seemed ever so much worse off than I was. After watching the rotten state of affairs in Denmark, Ninety-fifth Street didn't seem half bad. And, goody, goody! next week an Ibsen season begins! It is no accident that the Scandinavian drama is generally gloomy. Ibsen understood the psychology of his countrymen. He lived in a land of long cold winters and poor steam heat. If he had written joyfully and lightheartedly, thousands, well say hundreds, of Norwegians would have gone home to die or to wish to die. Instead he gave them folk like Oswald, and all the Norwegian playgoers could go skipping out into the moonlight with their teeth chattering from laughter as much as from cold. After seeing _Ghosts_ there is no place like home. I wish some of the Broadway dramatists were as shrewd as Ibsen. Then we might have plays in which nobody could raise the mortgage and the rent crisis in our own lives would seem less acute. If the heroine were turned out into a driving snowstorm and stayed there, I might appreciate our janitor. And if the wild young men and the women who pay and pay and pay would only quit reforming in the third act and climbing back to respectability out of the depths of degradation, I know I could derive no little satisfaction from the knowledge that the elevator in our building runs until twelve o'clock on Saturday nights. Deburau