Anyhow for eighteen months or a couple of years everything seemed to be all right. Katy was in love, had her heart in her business and was happy. But later on I began to notice clear symptoms of a decline in her letters. It began with Katy complaining about her friends. This is the first and most ominous sign. If a young scholar or littérateur begins his career by complaining bitterly about other scholars or littérateurs, it means that he is tired already and not fit for his business. Katy wrote to me that her friends would not come to rehearsals and never knew their parts; that they showed an utter contempt for the public in the absurd plays they staged and the manner they behaved. To swell the box-office receipts--the only topic of conversation--serious actresses degrade themselves by singing sentimentalities, and tragic actors sing music-hall songs, laughing at husbands who are deceived and unfaithful wives who are pregnant. In short, it was amazing that the profession, in the provinces, was not absolutely dead. The marvel was that it could exist at all with such thin, rotten blood in its veins. In reply I sent Katy a long and, I confess, a very tedious letter. Among other things I wrote: “I used to talk fairly often to actors in the past, men of the noblest character, who honoured me with their friendship. From my conversations with them I understood that their activities were guided rather by the whim and fashion of society than by the free working of their own minds. The best of them in their lifetime had to play in tragedy, in musical comedy, in French farce, and in pantomime; yet all through they considered that they were treading the right path and being useful. You see that this means that you must look for the cause of the evil, not in the actors, but deeper down, in the art itself and the attitude of society towards it.” This letter of mine only made Katy cross. “You and I are playing in different operas. I didn’t write to you about men of the noblest character, but about a lot of sharks who haven’t a spark of nobility in them. They are a horde of savages who came on the stage only because they wouldn’t be allowed anywhere else. The only ground they have for calling themselves artists is their impudence. Not a single talent among them, but any number of incapables, drunkards, intriguers, and slanderers. I can’t tell you how bitterly I feel it that the art I love so much is fallen into the hands of people I despise. It hurts me that the best men should be content to look at evil from a distance and not want to come nearer. Instead of taking an active part, they write ponderous platitudes and useless sermons....” and more in the same strain. A little while after I received the following: “I have been inhumanly deceived. I can’t go on living any more. Do as you think fit with my money. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Forgive me.”