One day in summer, when people whom I had been urging to behave in
some degree like human beings persisted in acting rather more like
the poor creatures who pass for men and women in most stage-plays, I
shut my manuscript in a drawer, and the next morning took an early
train into the city. I do not remember just what whim it was that led
me to visit the police court: perhaps I went because it was in the
dead vast and middle of the summer, and the town afforded little other
amusement; perhaps it was because, in my revolt against unreality, I
was in the humor to see life whose reality asserts itself every day in
the newspapers with indisputable force. If this was so, I was fated to
a measure of disappointment, for when the court opened this reality
often appeared no more substantial than the fiction with which I had
lost my patience at home. But I am bound to say that it was much more
entertaining, and that it was, so to speak, much more artistically
treated. It resolved itself into melodrama, or romantic tragedy,
having a prevailing comic interest, with moments of intensity, and
with effects so thrilling that I came away with a sense of the highest
theatrical illusion.