“With what eagerness did Mr. Frohman wait our visits to the city and listen to the new scenes! Towards the latter part of August we had completed a five-act drama, which we handed in with the understanding that it might be cut, revised and rewritten. We told Mr. Frohman that if it did not come up to expectations there was time for him to look elsewhere for a play. “It must have been after the reading of the Third Act that Mr. Frohman’s office door opened and he rushed out crying: ’By Jove, it’s fine, it’s splendid!’ De Mille and I didn’t stop. We hurried to the station and were off to Echo Lake for our vacation....” The play of “The Wife” is in five acts and it involves fourteen persons. Its scenes are laid in Newport, New York, and Washington, D. C., about 1887. Its dialogue is written in that strain of commonplace colloquy which is assumed, with justice, to be generally characteristic of “fashionable society” in its superficial mood and ordinary habit. The influence of Bronson Howard’s example is obvious in it,--that writer’s plan, which had been successful, of catching and reflecting the general tone and manner of “everyday life” and often of distressingly “everyday persons”; persons who, nevertheless, are at times constrained to behave in a manner not easily credible, if, indeed, possible, whether in everyday or any other kind of life. To copy commonplaces in a commonplace manner is by some judges deemed the right and sure way to please the public. That method does often succeed, since, generally, people like to see themselves. This, however, was not the method of the great masters of comedy, such as Molière, Congreve, and Sheridan, who taught, by example and with results of great value, that a comedy, while it should be a true reflection of life and a faithful picture of manners, should also be made potent over the mind, the heart, and the imagination, by delicate, judicious exaggeration, should be made entertaining by equivoque, and should be made impressive by the fibre of strong thought, and sympathetic by trenchant, sparkling dialogue. That old method of writing comedy, although it has been exemplified by the best writers and is still attempted, has, to a great extent, been superseded by the far inferior and much easier method of conventional colloquialism and chatter. The ground plan of “The Wife,” though Belasco may have thought it a novelty, was, even in 1887, mossy with antiquity. A girl, _Helen Freeman_, parts from her lover, _Robert Grey_, in a moment of pique, and weds with another man, to whom she gives her hand, but not at first her heart; she subsequently meets her old flame and finds that she is still fond of him; causes social tattle by being seen [Illustration: From an old photograph. Belasco’s Collection. DAVID BELASCO CLAY M. GREENE In 1887, when, in collaboration, they wrote “Pawn Ticket 210” for Lotta]