how and why this may be, but the privilege, for less obvious reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction.  A woman may tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a man cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of a woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome.  One feels this true even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a case in point.  Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking effect than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not play Hamlet at all.  That sublime ideal is the property of the human imagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossible.  No harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched.  Hamlet, after all the horse-play, would be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by a woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine for a fresh effect, is Hamlet disabled, for a long time, at least, in its vital essence.  I felt that it would take many returns to the Hamlet of Shakespeare to efface the impression of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet; and as I prepared to escape from my row of stalls in the darkening theatre, I experienced a noble shame for having seen the Dane so disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell’s word.  I had not been obliged to come; I had voluntarily shared in the wrong done; by my presence I had made myself an accomplice in the wrong.  It was high ground, but not too high for me, and I recovered a measure of self-respect in assuming it.

THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON

He had often heard of it.  Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print under the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought to see it.  He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find it in his experience so largely subjective.  If there was any drama at all it was wholly in his own consciousness.  But the thing was certainly impressive in its way.

I.

He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by chance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised to recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the pleasure of seeing.

Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to see his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight to the next midnight.  But the mere thought of it gave him