ad been so well received in England.

Those who try to tar Mr. Frohman with the commercial brush will
readily perceive their error. Had Miss Tempest packed the Empire
Theater at every performance, the enormous expenses of this
undertaking could never have been defrayed. The manager did not
quiver. The actress--viewing the return of her countrymen, with
flaccid pocketbooks, from the land of dollars--had no misgivings. She
came, and she saw, and she conquered.

Miss Tempest, in "The Freedom of Suzanne," was worth waiting for. She
was worth suffering for. We were perfectly willing to admit that the
season was over, and we were not sorry, for it was one of the worst on
record. But to the Empire we trooped to sample this last offering, and
it was so good, and so delightful, that it flicked the season back for
a month. Miss Tempest had a first-night audience that gave the
"among-those-present" chroniclers quite a tussle. It seemed like early
September, when theatrical hopes run high, and the demon of
disillusion is not even a cloud as big as a man's hand.

Since Marie Tempest left musical comedy--that sinking ship--to its
fate, and devoted herself to the development of her own unique gifts
as a comedienne, her husband, Mr. Cosmo Gordon Lennox, has been the
tailor that made the plays fit. If a playwriting husband can't fit his
own wife, then his capabilities must surely be limited. Mr. Lennox
proved, in "The Marriage of Kitty" last year, that he quite understood
the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of the clever little actress,
and knew exactly how to make them salient. Although English, nobody
could accuse Miss Tempest of being a "bread-and-butter miss." The most
vivid imagination could never associate her with a white muslin gown,
a pretty blue sash, a Christmas-card expression of surprised
innocence, and the "prunes and prisms" attendant upon those luxuries.

Mr. Lennox had to trip across the English Channel, which is a nasty,
"choppy" crossing, to find material that would suit his wife. That is
always a troublesome thing to do, because the "goods," when bought,
must be well soaked overnight, in order to remove the sting. This was
the policy he pursued with "The Marriage of Kitty." The tactics were
very similar in the case of "The Freedom of Suzanne," which was cut
from the cloth of "Gyp's" novel, "Autour du Divorce." According to the
program, the author "wished to acknowledge his indebtedness for
certain passages in t