Hearts and Masks

A delicious old-time detective story! An excellent entertainment and more reasonable in its unreasonableness than any in its ilk.***A millionaire from New York has chanced to set near a girl in a theater in Paris and been irresistibly drawn to her. She is an artist studying abroad, a Virginian. She has sociological views, with a tender pity for men who have gone wrong, and would reform them. This state of her mind is not very clearly established, but, for the purpose of the play, the millionaire sets out to win her on this clue to her nature.To describe how the many active complications are brought about would reveal too much of the story. But it works. The engaging young millionaire employs an ex-convict. who turns out to be an honest fellow after the theory of the present the present prison warden, as secretary. He is directed to steal a necklace from the person of the girl, in order to save a young man who bad stolen it and made a gift of it. This youth is the son of a former sweetheart of the millionaire, and is reformed in the end by being shown the evil of his way. He had taken to social pillage because he could not otherwise support his mother properly, his explanation being that he could get no employment because of the prevalent theory among business men that crooks should be employed on the chance of their reformation.