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It was not on this occasion that Barry Whelan committed the crime for which he has since become rather famous. It was later. It came at the end of a long and exasperating argument between him and Trossett in which Whelan cited every fact he could think of from the lives of great authors to convince his host that Mary Trevena must be given to the world. There lay the pile of script in the cabinet where it had been thrown. There was the great public crystallized, apotheosized, so to speak, in Broadway, and waiting for it. There was Whelan eager to be the messenger. And only an absurd delicacy stood in the way. Poor Trossett's vigilance was not equal to his determination.

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"That one is n't very comfortable,' he lied, while Whelan allowed himself to be ushered into a smaller and much less attractive seat.

But Whelan essayed lightness and good-humored remorse. "When I tell you my little tale,' he began, 'you probably won't want me to sit anywhere in your house.'

The other looked at him with very small interest in his jocosity.

'How does it feel to be a great dramatist?' demanded Whelan, with infinite tact.

'M-m-m-m,' answered the great dramatist, waiting for the point.

'How are you going to like it when

your play is the rage of New York, eh?' Whelan managed a genial and real-sounding laugh.

"That can never happen. I shall never write a play for New York.' 'But you have!'

Something in the nervous loudness of Whelan's tone made Trossett sit up straight and stare. He rubbed a shaking small hand over his forehead. His eye, aghast, wandered from Whelan's face toward the door of the cabinet. He started to rise.

'Don't bother to look, old man,' said Whelan. 'It's gone.' Then he went on hurriedly. 'We are all delighted with your good luck. Mrs. Hartsfield and everybody — we are all quite happy.'

'My good luck?' Trossett repeated, in a daze.

'Yes. You know how much I admire you, Trossett, and how much faith I had in anything you would write, even though I had n't read it. Well-' He found it difficult to go on, the man's eyes were so full of pain and astonishment. 'I thought your play ought to have a hearing, so-'

Trossett got to his feet, walked to the cabinet, and threw it open. The manuscript was not there. He dropped to the seat by the writing-desk and stared with pitiful bewilderment at the triumphant robber.

Whelan tried to bluster and laugh, but nothing changed the silence. Trossett said at last, 'Would you mind leaving me alone? I have some explanations to make.' On that enigmatic dismissal Whelan had to take his leave.

V

The critic who finally found the right words to describe Miss Constance Tremaine called her a 'lovely hoyden.' She had sprung up and bloomed suddenly in the garden of New York's

unknown actresses like a solitary nasturtium, and every eye was from that day forth fixed on her in wide wonder. Her manager, who had come to know her, did not suggest directly that she undertake to create, for the great world, the character of Mary Trevena. He counseled her cousin, Mr. Whelan, not to approach her on the subject. Instead he casually suggested that he had run across an interesting new play which she might be amused to read.

She burst into his office next morning, cast the blue-bound transcript of Mary Trevena's soul down upon his desk, and slapped it with a slender, imperious hand. 'Let me do that thing!' she cried, in a voice which admitted no question of obedience. The bright eyes, which could pierce the dark pit of a theatre to the last row of upturned faces, were warm with vital enthusiasm. Before her manager's heavy gaze, her figure was tense in the telling clarity of a perfect pose. Her personality, untrammeled by the minor impediments of playing a rôle, was flaming. With her manager, Miss Tremaine was that hidden being whom admirers and journalists pursued in vain her 'real self.'

Her manager smiled covertly and said he would take the new play into consideration. He kept her waiting three days before he told her he would, as a matter of acceding to her wishes, produce 'Mary Trevena' as soon as she was free from her present part, which began, from that day, to fall off in quality. Everything was all settled and rehearsals began in three months.

Mrs. Hartsfield feared some active interference by Mr. Trossett to save his play from the public. But that was beyond his strength. He was a silent martyr in their hands when once the trick was played. He even put his name on a contract, without reading it, although he did succeed in refusing to

see the manager or Miss Tremaine or to attend rehearsals. Whelan was wearied in trying to get anything but a reproachful and miserable silence out of him as he was told how splendidly things were going and how Connie Tremaine had told at least four people that it was the best part she had ever had. She was crazy about it. She loved it. She was dying to meet the author. But the author would not be met.

He withdrew from his regular round of drawing-rooms, and Mrs. Hartsfield never saw him from one at-home day to the next. He spent evening hours in the big chair by his fireplace looking at the averted eyes of Mary Trevena's portrait. He was sure he had been forgiven by the lady whose fragile presence was being sinned against. So understanding a person as she could not feel resentment against his innocent carelessness. But he suffered for her.

He had only the meagrest consolation in the fact that Mary Trevena was in those lines, all of her. He knew Miss Tremaine was a competent and brilliant actress and he struggled with the hope that the lines might be honestly and bravely spoken. It would be the wanton exposure of a lovely thing before a rabble without understanding, but at least it would be the real Mary; and perhaps one or two souls might comprehend. He leaned timorously on that.

VI

Any play which starred Connie Tremaine was sure of a brilliant first night. All the critics whose word meant anything to the amateurs of dramatic gossip would be there with sharpened wits. Each one hoped he might discover some new adjective by which he could embalm himself with her forever in the amber of a phrase. They all admitted the justice of the 'lovely hoyden,' but they hoped perhaps to equal that

classic epithet. The Empire was filled with people through whom ran sympathetic waves of delightful suspense.

The first act was puzzling. It had wit, certainly, and not a line but went ringing from Connie's pretty lips in crystal accuracy, straight at the susceptible listener. She knew how to make her points. But the act offered little hope of ever getting anywhere. 'What a queer thing,' said the critics during the intermission. 'It's clever enough, but it does n't sound like a play.' One man, out of depths of erudition, brought up a forgotten analogy. 'Sounds like a Dolly Dialogue,' he said, and two men remembered enough to smile.

The second act was no better. It was quite evident that the verdict of the jury which ranged itself in silence and darkness on the receptive side of the footlights was going to be mild. The play about Mary Trevena was doomed to be praised for its delectable dialogue and put down with that dreadfulest of condemnations, 'Clever, but not a play.'

Miss Tremaine and her manager had a little talk in her dressing-room before the third and final act. "The thing is dead,' he pronounced succinctly with the complete despair of a first night in his voice. 'It's dead!'

But Connie had more at stake than the rôle of Mary Trevena. She had never suffered a failure or a moderate success. She meant to harvest superlatives out of the evening if it lay within her brilliant little self to do it. She clenched her fists and dabbed at her make-up and swore a ladylike but heartfelt oath.

'Can't you rough it a little?' asked her manager.

'I'll save it,' promised Miss Tremaine, through her teeth. 'You watch me! I'll stand those people on their heads yet. I tell you this is a great play.'

'Go ahead and prove it,' answered her manager, and wrathfully chewed his cigar.

Miss Tremaine felt a consuming rage against the author who had so bungled his revelation of the character of Mary Trevena. Authors - bah! They never knew the stage possibilities of their own people. She would plunge into the nebulous texture of this dialogue and find reality and bring it forth for the blessed audience to see. She knew what Mary Trevena ought to be; she ought to be exactly like Constance Tremaine. Mary Trevena was a name to which Connie's sturdy beauty could give a local habitation.

She leaped back upon the stage, alert and ruthless, and proceeded to 'rough it a little.' Subtleties which had puzzled the keenest of the audience were glossed with blinding smiles and magnetic gestures. Dreamy reluctance was blown out of the lines as cool mist flees a wind.

Below the perfected surface of her self, not very far below perhaps, but hidden deeper than other elements of her soul, Miss Tremaine had a knowledge of her unnumbered sisters. What women could feel she knew; and she could give that knowledge an irresistible impersonation. A flaming passion was in her throat, too, but she could not be choked. She set it free. She dragged the lovely hesitations of Mary's phrases away from what they had concealed. She throbbed with emotions immutable and everlasting and everlasting the springs of life.

The actor who played The Man had been chosen for responsiveness to her, and now he caught fire. The dialogue became hot and human. People in the back rows sat up as if to say 'Aha!' The pursuit of sex emerged, a stark duel, from behind Mr. Trossett's symbolic musings.

Miss Tremaine took a line meant to cast a shy, reverent light on the fancy of

a girl and shot it into the air.- a challenge to a world of men.

A small, trembling man, taking his hand from his high white forehead, arose in the middle of the pit. Many people did not see him; they were intent upon the quickening pulse of the play. But he cried out in a high-pitched voice, 'Stop!'

Not a tremor disturbed the taut rhythms of Miss Tremaine on the stage. She may not have heard the cry of distress; at any rate she went on, gloriously effective.

'Stop!' cried the little man in the pit. 'You blasphemer!'

When people around him began to rise and make noises, and two murderously angry ushers rushed toward him, he turned from his seat and walked weakly up the aisle.

The 'friends of the author,' Mrs. Hartsfield and Barry Whelan and all the others, who had occupied exposed box-seats and wondered where Trossett had hid himself, watched him go with appalled helplessness. They did not try to follow. Around their corner congealed a heavy, fearful silence, while the rest of the audience, scarcely noticing the antics of the queer stranger, turned back in loyal appreciation to the spectacle of Constance Tremaine impersonating womanhood.

The rest of the play was frequently interrupted with shattering outbursts of applause. It seemed at last to mean something. The critics settled back in their seats with simulated boredom, content now, and sure they could use all their prepared adjectives.

The final scene was riotous. With flowers and shouts and waving hands and cries for a speech, a great clamor and joy swept up toward the victorious Tremaine. She panted and smiled and stood out to be adored. Barry Whelan, who had planned to rise at this moment and shout 'Author! Author!' sat in blank silence. Mrs. Hartsfield, more courageous, clapped and smiled an utterly empty smile. Beyond their most extravagant expectations the play was

a success.

VII

Mr. Trossett stood before his own door on the landing of the old house in Twelfth Street and hesitated. There was a vague sound of blasphemous echoes in his mind, and in his heart was nauseous despair. He was afraid to enter his apartment

a

man's home refined by the touch of a woman.' It took his last strength to step through the door and switch on the light. He dropped into his big chair by the fireplace.

After a long while he took his hand away from his eyes. The room was cold. The light from the heavily curtained lamp on the table cast a bitterly clear illumination over the empty chair opposite him. There was no suggestion there of a presence, no gleam of palegreen silk, no glimmer of a face, no aura of an unseen, lovely woman. Mary Trevena was a broken dream.

Mr. Trossett was a brave man. He took the effeminate blue-china plates down from the mantelshelf and smashed them in the fireplace.

THE ART OF EXAMINATION

BY A. LAWRENCE LOWELL

Is examination an art? Many American school-teachers will at once reply: 'No; it is an evil.' Perhaps, if wrongly used, it may be both. War is an evil; an evil; but no one will deny that there is a military art which can be studied, ascertained, and applied. The Black Art of the Middle Ages, or that part of it called alchemy, has developed into the chemistry of the present day. The value of an art depends upon the purposes for which it is used, and the intelligence and precision of its application. Formerly employed chiefly for educational objects, measurements of natural and acquired capacity have of late been greatly extended. Civil-service examinations are one example of this; the methods of determining the fitness of candidates for industrial employment are another. Vocational guidance, whereof we hear much nowadays, is based upon discovering the aptitudes and qualities of boys or youths. Psychological tests to which the recruiting of our soldiers in the World War gave wide prominence, and to which many colleges are giving attention for the purpose of admission or experiment

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desire for some means of determining relative capacities—that is, for a form of examination that shall be reliable for the purpose to which it is applied.

Academic or educational examinations differ from purely psychological tests in that their object is to ascertain not only native ability but also proficiency in the study of specialized subjects. It may seem strange to say that in this country the art of examination is still in its infancy. That is, nevertheless, true; because in the case of school studies it is applied only to immature youths; and because in institutions of higher learning it has been employed chiefly by the instructor to measure the progress of students in a particular course taught by himself. Certainly we have not considered with sufficient care the object, scope, and utility of examinations. May they not be said to have three distinct objects? (1) To measure the progress of pupils; (2) as a direct means of education; (3) to set a standard for achievement.

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One of our difficulties has come from paying almost exclusive attention to the first of these objects. So far, indeed, has this been carried that there is a tendency in some American schools to regard examinations as indictments for crime ordeals to be imposed only upon the delinquent; to consider that the good scholar, who is known to have made satisfactory progress,

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