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THE DRAMATIC STORY 107 ridiculous old lady asking for the man in the funny clothes is the final touch of humor. A crowd of the students quietly follow her up the stairs to listen at the door. The son, in the anger of the moment, turns on her. In the rush of shame and misery he lays his whole heart bare, tearing down the air castles that have been years in building. Then the old woman speaks, not in reproach but in explana- tion. She tells of all her struggles to keep him going, she shows her hands, gnarled and knotted with toil. She shows the Geth- semnae of her own narrow life. And all the time the crowd at the door grows more sober. They had come to see the fun. Now they cannot leave. At last the cap- tain of the crew rouses himself and enters the room followed by the others. He does not give the son money for a suit of clothes; that would be charity. But he does take the boy into the fellow- ship of the class, of the college. He makes him one of them and there is the unspoken promise that he will be shown the ways by which the poorer students may earn their way through college. The old lady leaves and the whole class gallantly and reverently escorts her to the waiting car. Is not that story more gripping in its appeal than the story of the man who shoots his best friend, takes to the hills and meets death behind a rock standing off a sheriff's posse? For that mat- ter doesn't it make more of an appeal than its western comple- ment that has been filmed several times; the story of the lad who has turned murderer or thief. His mother comes West and while she stays the men hide his real character and force him to keep straight that she may not be undeceived. It will take more skill to develop a plot like that correctly, but it will make a story bel- ter worth while. Because a story is simple as to plot it does not necessarily fol- low that it is more easy to write. You can make more noise with a brass band than with a grand piano, but sometimes the pianist is a greater musician than the men of the band and evokes more wonderful harmonies. In the crime story the incidents will generally carry the charac- ters, but in the heart interest story the characters must carry the play. In other words the crime story with its rush of inci- dent will be so exciting for the moment that the lack of real story will not be noticed, but the heart interest story seems real because you have made the people real; so real that their doings interest us. Mother love is perhaps the strongest appeal of all, but it must be a genuine appeal, a real story of mother love, not merely the dragging into a weak story of a mother to save a worthless plot.