The actor has accomplished this by means of a nice knowledge of what symbolic expression means to the art of the stage. He is certainly a painter of pictures and moods, the idea and his image perfectly commingled, endowing this mediocre play with true charm by the distinction he lends it, by sheer discretion, and by a power of selection. All this he brings to a play which, if it had been written nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, and justly too, of having written to stimulate the lachrymal effusions of the shop-girl, a play about which she might telephone her girl friend, at which she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again for the street. No artist, no accepted artist, has given a more suggestive rendering than has Barrymore here. It would be difficult to say where he is at his best, except that the first half of the play counts for most in point of strength and opportunity. A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the neophyte--the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness of things real and temporal--vision and memory counting for all there is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of symbolism and mystical insinuation. One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold method--against a background of what could have been overheated acting or at least a superabundance of physical attack--the warmth of the play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion. It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not been equaled for me since I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and Eleonora Duse.