The Story of a Play by William Dean Howells

It was Miss Havisham and not Godolphin who appeared to the public as having ended the combination their managers had formed. The interviewing on both sides continued until the interest of the quarrel was lost in that of the first presentation of the play, when the impression that Miss Havisham had been ill-used was effaced by the impression made by Miss Pettrell in the part of Salome. Her performance was not only successful in the delicacy and refinement which her friends expected of her, but she brought to the work a vivid yet purely feminine force which took them by surprise and made the public her own. No one in the house could have felt, as the Maxwells felt, a certain quality in it which it would be extremely difficult to characterize without overstating it. Perhaps Louise felt this more even than her husband, for when she appealed to him, he would scarcely confess to a sense of it; but from time to time in the stronger passages she was aware of an echo, to the ear and to the eye, of a more passionate personality than Miss Pettrell's. Had Godolphin profited by his knowledge of Miss Havisham's creation, and had he imparted to Miss Pettrell, who never saw it, hints of it which she used in her own creation of the part? If he had, just what was the measure and the nature of his sin? Louise tormented herself with this question, while a sense of the fact went as often as it came, and left her in a final doubt of it. What was certain was that if Godolphin had really committed this crime, of which he might have been quite unconsciously guilty, Miss Pettrell was wholly innocent of it; and, indeed, the effect she made might very well have been imagined by herself, and only have borne this teasing resemblance by pure accident. Godolphin was justly punished if he were culpable, and he suffered an eclipse in any case which could not have been greater from Miss Havisham.

There were recalls for the chief actors at every fall of the curtain, and at the end of the third act, in which Godolphin had really been magnificent, there began to be cries of "Author! Author! " and a messenger appeared in the box where the Maxwells sat and begged the author, in Godolphin's name, to come behind at once. The next thing that Louise knew the actor was leading her husband on the stage and they were both bowing to the house, which shouted at them and had them back once and twice and still shouted, but now with a certain confusion of voices in its demand, which continued till the author came on a fourth time, led by the actor as before, and himself leading the heroine of his piece. Then the storm of applause left no doubt that the will of the house had been rightly interpreted.