In the eyes of the playwright Sir Ralph Incledon, as in the eyes of the early Spaniards, the Americans were savages with unlimited gold to exchange for glass beads. He   
had a noble contempt for all of us except our dollars, and he was almost ashamed to take those; their very nomenclature was vulgar and the decimal system was French.
 
The London success of his piece following upon his arrival at knighthood had completely spoiled him. Other great writers and actors who had received the accolade had 
 
been rendered a little meeker and more knightly as knights, but Incledon became almost unendurably offensive, even to his fellows in London. The decent English in New 
 
York who had to meet him abominated him as civilized Americans abroad abominate the noisy specimens of Yankee insolence who go twanging their illiterate contempt 
 
through the palaces and galleries and restaurants of Europe.
 
Sir Ralph was greatly distressed with the company Reben had proudly mustered for him. Tom Brereton was English born and bred, but Sir Ralph accused him of “an 
 
extraord’n’r’ly atrowcious Amayric’n acs’nt.” Americans who had seen the London performance had been amazed not only at the success of Miss Berkshire, but at her 
 
very tolerance on the stage; they said she looked like a giraffe and talked like a cow. But she pleased her own public somehow. When Sir Ralph saw Sheila he was not 
 
impressed; he said that she was “even wahss” than Brereton and under “absolutely neigh-o sec’mst’nces could he permit hah to deviate from the p’fawm’nce of 
 
d’yah aold Bahkshah.”
 
Sheila had flattered herself that she knew something of England and English; she had visited the island enough, and some of its stateliest homes; and she had had some 
 
of the worst young peers making love to her. But Sir Ralph, she wrote her aunt, evidently regarded her “as something between a squaw and a pork-packer’s daughter.”
 
Sir Ralph threw her into such a bog of humiliation that she floundered at every step. How could she give an intelligent reading to a line when he wanted every word 
 
sung according to the idiom of another woman of another race? How could she embody a r?le in its entirety when every utterance and motion was to be patterned on Sir 
 
Ralph’s wretched imitations of a woman she had never seen?
 
Sir Ralph not only threw his company into a panic, but he revealed a positive genius for offending the reporters, the critics, the public. Before the first curtain 
 
rose there was a feeling of hostility, against which the disaffected and disorganized players struggled in vain.
 
His play was a beautiful structure, full of beautiful thoughts expertly wrought into form. But Sir Ralph, like so many authors, seemed to contradict in his person 
 
everything worth while in his work.
 
His wife, Lady Incledon, knew him to be earnest, hard-working, emotional, timorous. His anxiety and modesty when at bay before the public gave the impression of 
 
conceit, contempt, and insolence. If he had been more cocksure of his play he would not have been so critical of its interpreters. If he had not been so afraid of the 
 
Americans he would not have tried to make them afraid of him. No tenderer-hearted novelist ever wrote than Dickens, yet he had the knack of infuriating mobs of people 
 
into a warm desire to lynch him. No sweeter-souled poet ever sang than Keats, yet Byron said he never saw him but he wanted to kick him.
 
Sir Ralph Incledon had the misfortune to belong to this class. He was not popular at home and he was maddening abroad. He made Americans remember Bunker Hill and long 
 
to avenge Nathan Hale. The critics felt it their patriotic duty to make reprisals for all the Americans who had failed in London and to send this Piccadillian back 
 
with his coat-tails between his legs.
 
The opening performance in New York was a first-class disaster. The audience did not follow the London custom of calling the author out and booing him. It left him in 
 
the wings, excruciated with ingrowing speech. He had drawn up one of the most tactless orations ever prepared in advance by a well-meaning author. He was not permitted 
 
to deliver it. He had a cablegram written out to send his anxious wife overseas. He did not send it. When he read the next morning’s papers he was simply dazed. He 
 
had come as a missionary direct from the capital to a benighted province and he was received with jeers—or “jahs,” as his dialect would be spelled in our dialect.
 
He wept privately and then put on an armor of contempt. He sailed shortly after, leaving the Americans marooned on their desert continent.
 
The actors were treated with little mercy by most of the critics, except to be used as bludgeons to whack the author with. Sheila’s notices were of the “however” 
 
sort. “Miss Sheila Kemble is a promising young actress; the part she played, however, was so irritating—” or, “In spite of all the cleverness of—” or, “Sheila 
 
Kemble exhausted her resources in vain to give a semblance of life to—”
 
Sheila sent the clippings to Mrs. Vining, and added: “Every bouquet had a brickbat in it. We are not long for this world, I fear.”
 
Reben fought valiantly for the play. He squandered money on extra spaces in the papers and on the bill-boards. He quoted from the critics who praise everything and he 
 
emphasized lines about the scenery. The play simply did not endure the sea change. People who came would not enjoy it, and would not recommend it. It was hard even to 
 
give away complimentary seats, and the result was one that would have been more amazing if it were less common; a successful play by a famous author produced with a 
 
famous cast at a leading theater in the largest city of the New World was played to a theater that could not be filled at any or no price. The receipts fell to forty 
 
dollars one night.
 
A newspaper wit wrote, “Last night the crowds on Broadway were so dense that a man was accidentally pushed into the Odeon Theater.” On another day he said, “Last 
 
night during a performance of Sir Ralph Incledon’s masterpiece some miscreant entered the Odeon Theater and stole all the orchestra chairs.”
 
The slow death of a play is a miserable process. The actors began to see the nobilities of the work once the author was removed from in front of it. They regretted its 
 
passing, but plays cannot live in a vacuum. Novels and paintings can wait patiently and calmly in suspended animation till their understanders grow up, but plays, like 
 
infants, must be nourished at once or they die and stay dead.
 
Sheila and all the company had fought valiantly for the drama. Once Sir Ralph’s back was turned, they fell to playing their r?les their own way, and they at least 
 
enjoyed their work more. But the audiences never came.
 
Sheila was plunged into deeps of gloom. She felt that she must suffer part of the blame or at least the punishment of the play’s non-success. She wished she had 
 
stayed with “A Friend in Need.”
 
But Reben had always been known as a good sport, a plucky taker of whatever medicine the public gave him. After a bastinado from the critics he had waited to see what 
 
the people would do. There was never any telling. Sometimes the critics would write p?ans of rapture and the lobby would be as deserted as a graveyard, leaving the 
 
box-office man nothing to do but manicure his nails. Sometimes the critics would unanimously condemn, and there would be a queue at the door the next morning. 
 
Sometimes the critics would praise and the mob would storm the window. Sometimes they would blame and audiences would stay away as if by conspiracy. In any case, “the 
 
box-office tells the story.”
 
Cassard, the manager, once said that he could tell if a play were a success by merely passing the theater an hour after the performance was over. A more certain test 
 
at the Odeon Theater was the manner of Mr. Chittick, the box-office man. If he laid aside his nail-file without a sigh and proved patient and gracious with the 
 
autobiographical woman who loitered over a choice of seats and their date, the play was a failure. If Mr. Chittick insulted the brisk business man who pushed the exact 
 
sum of money over the ledge and weakly requested “the two best, please” the play was a triumph. Mr. Chittick was a very model of affability while Incledon’s play 
 
occupied the stage of the unoccupied theater.
 
Reben’s motto was “The critics can make or break the first three weeks of a play and no more. After that they are forgotten.” If he saw the business growing by so 
 
much as five dollars a night he hung on. But the Incledon play sagged steadily. At the end of a week Reben had the company rehearsing another play called “Your Uncle 
 
Dudley,” an old manuscript he had bought years ago to please a star he quarreled with later.
 
Reben talked big for a while about forcing the run; then he talked smaller and smaller with the receipts. Finally he annou............