A correspondent of the Boston _Herald_, writing from Brooklyn in 1888, gives his impressions of the rising “star”: “Anything more unlike than this young girl off the stage [he had been ‘an audience of one in assisting at her Thanksgiving repast, which was hurriedly swallowed between matinée and evening performances’] and as the character she represents before the footlights I have seldom seen. It is as though she were two distinct individuals, bearing absolutely no relation in manner, face, figure, temperament or intelligence to each other. Away from the footlights, and divested of the rôle she personates, Miss Marlowe is a frank, girlish young woman, almost awkward in her movements, and shy and retiring to excess in manner and speech. There are times when she seems almost plain and again one is surprised into thinking her absolutely beautiful.... She is not at all assertive; on the contrary, she impresses one as a person who would never force herself into any prominence. This is Miss Marlowe off the stage. “On the stage? Well, I had a mental shock when I saw her as Parthenia. It was like a transformation scene, and so complete that I almost failed to recognize the actress as the same shy, unformed girl I had been chatting with. Is she a great actress? Decidedly, no. But I would wager a good deal that the day is not far distant when she will be hailed as such.” Successful as she began now to be in other cities, she did not at once win as much favor in New York. It took her ten years to become as popular in the metropolis as she was in “the provinces.” Taking a general view of Miss Marlowe’s career it would seem that her conquest of New York coincided fairly accurately with her modification of her early ideals as to playing nothing but the “classic” parts, for, lying between the period of which we have been speaking and the later “Sothern and Marlowe” campaign with Shakespeare, there were some years (roughly from 1897 to 1904) when the “classics” were pretty well abandoned.[187]