ltant in his freedom, he went out into the street to see
what the world was doing.

_Enid's Choice_ was still running. A slight gain at the end of the first
week had enabled Helen to withhold her surrender to mammon. The second
week increased the attendance, but the loss on the two plays was now
very heavy, and Hugh and Westervelt and all her friends as well urged
her to give way to the imperious public; but some deep loyalty to
Douglass, some reason which she was not free to give, made her say, "No,
while there is the slightest hope I am going to keep on." To her mother
she said: "They are associated in my mind with something sweet and
fine--a man's aspiration. They taste good in my mouth after all these
years of rancid melodrama."

To herself she said: "If they succeed--if they win the public--my lover
will come back. He can then come as a conqueror." And the hope of this,
the almost certain happiness and honor which awaited them both led her
to devise new methods of letting the great non-theatre-going public know
that in George Douglass's _Enid_ they might be comforted--that it was,
indeed, a dramatic sign of promise. "We will give it a faithful trial
here, then go on the road. Life is less strenuous in the smaller
towns--they have time to think."

Hugh and Westervelt counselled against any form of advertising that
would seem to set the play in a class by itself, but Helen, made keen by
her suffering, bluntly replied: "You are both wrong, utterly wrong. Our
only possible chance of success lies in reaching that vast, sane,
thoughtful public which seldom or never goes to the theatre. This public
very properly holds a prejudice against the theatrical world, but it
will welcome a play which is high and poetic without being dull. This
public is so vast it makes the ordinary theatre-going public seem but a
handful. We must change all our methods of printing."

These ideas were sourly adopted in the third week, just when a note from
Douglass reached her by the hand of a special messenger. In this letter
he said: "I have completed another play. I have been grubbing night and
day with incessant struggle to put myself and all my ideals aside--to
give the public what it wants--to win your old admirers back, in order
that I might see you playing once more to crowded and brilliant houses.
It will succeed because it is diametrically opposed to all I have
expressed. It is my sacrifice. Will you accept it? Will you read my
play?