MANAGER. Well, Sardou is all right enough in his way, but I’m looking after something entirely different. Now I want a strong melodrama, and I’m going to call it _Only a Type-writer; or, The Pulse of the Great Metropolis_. There are twenty thousand type-writers in the city, and they’ll all want to see it, and each of them will fetch her mother or her feller along with her. Then they’ll gabble about it to all the people they know--nothing like a lot of women to advertise a piece--and if there’s any go in the play at all it’ll be talked about from Harlem to the Battery before it’s been on the boards a week. Now, of course, there’s got to be a moral; in fact, you’ve got to come out pretty d--d strong with your moral. My idea is this: In the first act you show the type-writer--whose folks are all gilt-edged people and ’way up--in an elegant cottage at Newport. She’s a light-hearted, innocent girl in a white muslin dress with a blue sash. I’m going to cast Pearl Livingston for the part, and she’s always crazy to make up for an innocent girl. Recollect you can’t spread the innocence and simplicity on too thick. Livingston wants to say a prayer with her hair hanging down her back, so if you can ring that in somehow it’ll be all the better. You must give her a good entrance, too, or she’ll kick like a steer. DRAMATIST. Excuse me, but I don’t see exactly how a type-writer could live in a Newport cottage. MANAGER. I’m coming to that right away. You see this act is just to show her as a light-hearted, innocent girl whose father has always been loaded up with dust, so she’s never known what it was to holler for a sealskin sack and not get it. But in the end of the act the father goes broke and exclaims, “Merciful heavens, we are beggars!” and drops dead. His wife gives a shriek, and all the society people rush on from the wings so as to make a picture at the back, while the daughter--that’s Livingston, you know--takes the centre of the stage and says, “No, mother”--or “mommer” would sound more affectionate, maybe--“No, mommer,” she says, “not beggars yet, for I will work for you!” Curtain! Are you on to the idea? DRAMATIST. Well, I believe I understand your scheme so far. But who’s the hero, and where do you get your comedy element?