“At last, after many plots were cast aside, I hit upon an idea. In my varied experience as dramatist and stage manager I had produced many so-called society plays in which the wife was either guilty of unfaithfulness or had committed an indiscretion. In the ’big’ scene it was the conventional thing for the husband to enter the room at midnight, and say to the woman: ’Of course, after all that has happened, I must get a divorce.’ Then he threw legal documents on the desk, and said: ’Here are the deeds to the house. All necessary provisions have been made for you and the child. But for the sake of society, etc., etc., we will continue to dwell under the same roof for a while.’ “‘Let us have a common-sense husband,’ I proposed to De Mille. ’After the husband’s discovery, let him treat his wife in a perfectly sane, human way. Let him say: “You need me. Turn to me, for your protection!”’ I had treated a similar situation in a play which ran in opposition to Bronson Howard’s ’The Banker’s Daughter’ at Baldwin’s Theatre in San Francisco. [The play was “The Millionaire’s Daughter.”] “Mr. De Mille agreed with me that we should use the idea of this husband as the basis of our Lyceum drama. I knew my ground, for I had gained my knowledge through experience. And, as we were to see, that incident saved ’The Wife’ in its hour of need. It has kept the play alive all these years and made it one of our most popular stock pieces. Before De Mille and I began the play we had virtually written our Third Act, jotting down notes and flashes of dialogue. Then we went to Mr. Frohman with our idea, and in that conference the Lyceum Theatre Company was born. In fact, it came into being before the play, and De Mille and I found ourselves obliged to create characters to fit the personalities of the players Mr. Frohman had engaged. We could not say: ’Here is our heroine. Find an actress to suit her’--for Georgia Cayvan was to be the leading lady, whatever the play might be, and it was for us to see that she had a womanly woman’s part.... “In the early part of May we began our race against time; night and day found us turning out experimental pages of dialogue. Every week we came to the city for a few hours, to see how the scenes of the play were progressing--for that was another condition imposed upon us--to decide upon the location of our acts before they were written. In those days audiences would not have been content with repetitions of scenes such as we now employ.