It was not until 1897, when the separation had taken place and Miss Marlowe had placed herself under the management of C. B. Dillingham, associated with Charles Frohman, that her period of artistic eclipse, and of great commercial prosperity, began. At the dictation of her new management, she abandoned almost altogether the heroines of poetic drama, and began a seven-year term in the service of the dramatized novel and the quickly forgotten modern ephemeral play. _The Countess Valeska_, _Colinette_, _Barbara Frietchie_, _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, and _The Cavalier_ make rather a sorry showing when compared with most of the list just given. She was made at last a successful “star” in New York,[191] but, as John Corbin wrote at the close of this period of eclipse, she was “mourned by the ‘road’ [i.e., the country outside New York] as the living tomb of a youth of abundant promise.” Of these plays of the interregnum it is curiously true that those least entitled to serious consideration as drama, _Barbara Frietchie_ and _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, were the most successful in advancing Miss Marlowe to the heights of popularity. _Colinette_--which was adapted from a French play--and _The Countess Valeska_--from the German--were both justified as skillfully written romantic dramas, of much strength and charm, if not of permanent value. _Barbara Frietchie_ and _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, however, were highly artificial, thin, pseudo-historical dramas, one dealing with the heroine of Whittier’s poem--the play was by the prolific Clyde Fitch--and the other a fictional episode in the life of Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Miss Marlowe’s sincerest admirers deeply regretted the time and energy she spent, year after year, on these and like plays; but they often asserted that her acting transformed and beautified the material with which she worked. As Colinette, according to Mr. Winter, she “gave a performance of singular flexibility and of exceptionally artistic grace, such as not only pleases while passing but leaves in the memory an ideal of noble and lovable womanhood,”--strong and partial words, but indicative of the glamour Miss Marlowe has thrown over inferior plays. “Her utterance of Barbara’s appeal to her father for her wounded lover’s life,” says Mr. Winter of her acting in Mr. Fitch’s play, “was spoken with exquisite beauty, and her expression of the frenzy of grief, on finding him dead, reached as great a height as is possible to spoken pathos.”