tly written by a lover of the drama, as well
as a lover of the theatre. Very little regard was paid to the
performance, but a great deal to the play, which was skilfully analyzed,
and praised and blamed in the right places. The writer did not attempt
to forecast its fate, but he said that whatever its fate with the public
might be, here, at least, was a step in the direction of the drama
dealing with facts of American life--simply, vigorously, and honestly.
It had faults of construction, but the faults were not the faults of
weakness. They were rather the effects of a young talent addressing
itself to the management of material too rich, too abundant for the
scene, and allowing itself to touch the borders of melodrama in its will
to enforce some tragic points of the intrigue. But it was not mawkish
and it was not romantic. In its highest reaches it made you think, by
its stern and unflinching fidelity to the implications, of Ibsen; but it
was not too much to say that it had a charm often wanting to that
master. It was full of the real American humor; it made its jokes, as
Americans did, in the very face of the most disastrous possibilities;
and in the love-passages it was delicious. The whole episode of the love
between Haxard's daughter, Salome, and Atland was simply the sweetest
and freshest bit of nature in the modern drama. It daringly portrayed a
woman in circumstances where it was the convention to ignore that she
ever was placed, and it lent a grace of delicate comedy to the somber
ensemble of the piece, without lowering the dignity of the action or
detracting from the sympathy the spectator felt for the daughter of the
homicide; it rather heightened this.

Louise read the criticism aloud, and then she and Maxwell looked at each
other. It took their breath away; but Louise got her breath first. "Who
in the world would have dreamed that there was any one who could write
such a criticism, _out there_?"

Maxwell took the paper, and ran the article over again. Then he said,
"If the thing did nothing more than get itself appreciated in that way,
I should feel that it had done enough. I wonder who the fellow is! Could
it be a woman?"

There was, in fact, a feminine fineness in the touch, here and there,
that might well suggest a woman, but they finally decided against the
theory: Louise said that a woman writer would not have the honesty to
own that the part Salome played in getting back her lover was true to
life,