Vickery went to his sister’s house and sat up all night, working on his play for Eldon. For months he toiled and moiled upon it. Sometimes he would write all day and   
all night upon a scene, and work himself up into a state of what he called soul-sweat.
 
He would go to bed patting himself on the shoulder and talking to himself as if he were a draught-horse and a Pegasus combined: “Good boy, ’Gene! Good work, old 
 
Genius!”
 
In the morning he would wake feeling all the after-effects of a prolonged carouse. He would reach for a cigarette and review with contempt all he had previously done. 
 
No critic could have reviled his work with less sympathy.
 
“By night I write plays and by day I write criticisms,” he would say.
 
Lazily he would cough himself out of bed, cough through his tub and into his clothes, and go to his table like a surly butcher to carve his play with long slashes of 
 
the blue pencil.
 
At length he had it as nearly finished as any play is likely to be before it has been read. He went to New York, where Eldon was playing, and easily persuaded him to 
 
listen to the drama. Vickery would not explain the story of the play beforehand.
 
“I want you to get it the way the audience does.”
 
He marched his buskined blank verse with the elocution of a poet and all the sonority his raucous voice could lend him. He was shocked to note that Eldon was not 
 
helping him along with enthusiasm. His voice wavered, faltered, sank. He was hardly audible at the climax of his big third act.
 
Here the Puritan hero, who had left the Old World for the New World and liberty, discovered that the other Puritans wanted liberty only for themselves, and so abhorred 
 
his principles of toleration that they exiled him into the wilderness, mercilessly expecting him to perish in the blizzards or at the hands of the Indians. The hero, 
 
like another Roger Williams, turned and denounced them, then vowed to found a state where a man could call his soul his own, and plunged into the storm.
 
Vickery closed the manuscript and gulped down a glass of water. He had not looked at Eldon for two acts; he did not look at him now. He simply growled, “Sorry it 
 
bored you so.”
 
“It doesn’t bore me!” Eldon protested. “It’s magnificent—”
 
“But—” Vickery prompted.
 
“But nothing. Only—well—you see you said it was a play for me, and I—I’ve been trying to like it for myself. But—well, it’s too good for me. I feel like a man 
 
who ordered a suit of overalls and finds that the tailor has brought him an ermine robe and velvet breeches. It’s too gorgeous for me.”
 
“Nonsense!” said Vickery. “You don’t have to softsoap me. Why don’t you like it?”
 
“I do! As a work of art it is a masterpiece. The fault is mine. You see, I admire the classic blank-verse plays so much that I wish people wouldn’t try to write any 
 
more of them. They’re not in the spirit of our age. In Shakespeare’s time men wore long curls and combed them in public, and tied love-knots in them and wrote 
 
madigrals and picked their teeth artistically with a golden picktooth. The best of them cried like babies when their feelings were hurt.
 
“Nowadays we’d lynch a man that behaved as they did. Then they tried to use the most eloquent words. Now we try to use the simplest or, better yet, none at all. I 
 
think that our way is bigger than theirs, but, anyway, it’s our way.
 
“And then the Puritans. I admire them in spots. My people came over in one of the early boats. But plays about Puritans never succeed. Do you know why? It’s because 
 
the Puritans preached the gospel of Don’t! Everything was Don’t—don’t dance, don’t sing, don’t kiss, don’t have fun, don’t wear bright colors, don’t go to 
 
plays, don’t have a good time. But the theater is the place where people go to have a good time, a good laugh, a good cry, or a good scare. The whole soul of the 
 
theater is to reconcile people with life and with one another.
 
“The Puritans call the theater immoral. It is so blamed moral that it is untrue to life half the time, for wickedness always has to be punished in the theater, and we 
 
know it isn’t in real life.
 
“And another thing, Vick, why should the theater do anything for the Puritans? They never did anything for us except to tear down the playhouses and call the actors 
 
hard names. And what good came of it all?
 
“Here’s a book I picked up about the Puritans, because it has a lot about my ancestors. They had a daughter named Remember and a son named Wrastle. But look at this.
 
” Eldon got up, found the volume, and hunted for the page, as he raged: “Now the Puritans in our country had none of the alleged causes of immorality—they had no 
 
novels, no plays, no grand or comic operas, no nude art, no vaudeville, no tango, and no moving pictures. They ought to have been pretty good, eh? Well, take a peek at 
 
what their Governor William Bradford writes.”
 
He handed the book to Vickery, whose eyes roved along the page:
 
Anno Dom: 1642. Marvilous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickednes did grow breake forth here, in a land wher the same was so much witnesed against, 
 
and so narrowly looked unto, & severly punished when it was knowne; as in no place more, and so much, that I have known or head of . . . . . espetially drunkennes and 
 
unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene persons unmaried, for which many both men & women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. . . 
 
things fearful to name have broak forth in this land, oftener then once . . . one reason may be, that ye Divell may carrie a greater spite against the churches of 
 
Christ and ye gospell hear, by how much ye more they endeavor to preserve holynes and puritie amongst them . . . that he might cast a blemishe & staine upon them in ye 
 
eyes of ye world, who use to be rashe in judgmente.
 
Vickery smiled sheepishly, and Eldon relieved him of the book, exclaiming:
 
“Think of it, those terribly protected people were so bad they could only explain it by saying that Satan worked overtime! There is one of the most hideous stories in 
 
here ever published and you can find facts that make The Scarlet Letter look innocent.”
 
Vickery protested, mildly: “Of course the Puritans were human and intolerant. That’s the whole point of my play, the struggle of a man against them.”
 
Eldon opposed him still. “But why should we worry over that? The Puritans have been pretty well whipped out. Liberty is pretty well secured for men in America. Why 
 
try to excite an audience about what they all are as used to as the air they breathe? Let Russia write about such things. Why not write a play about the exciting 
 
things of our own days? If you want liberty for a theme, why don’t you write about the fight the women are waging for freedom? Turn your hero into a heroine; turn 
 
your Puritans into conservative men and women of the day who stand just where they did. Show up the modern home as this book shows up the old Puritans.”
 
Vickery was dazed. Of all the critical suggestions he had ever heard, this was the most radical, to change the hero to a heroine, and vice versa.
 
He stared at Eldon. “Are you in favor of woman suffrage, you, of all men?”
 
Eldon laughed. “You might as well ask me if I am in favor of the coming winter or the hot spell or the next earthquake. All I know is that my opposition wouldn’t 
 
make the slightest difference to them and that I might as well reconcile myself to them.
 
“There’s nothing on this earth except death and the taxes that’s surer to come than the equality of women—in the sense of equality that men mean. The first place 
 
where women had a chance was the stage; it’s the only place now where they are put on the same footing with the men. They have every advantage that men have, and earn 
 
as much money, or more, and have just as many privileges, or more. The one question asked is, ‘Can you deliver the goods?’ That’............