Those who have known Miss Marlowe in her own person say that the simplicity and the good taste observable in her work as an actress find a counterpart in her life off the stage. The home she maintained for years at Highmount in the Catskills was a quiet retreat where she enjoyed the outdoors, her books, and the society of a group of friends, most of whom were not personages known to the theatergoing public. Her liking for books, which is said to be keen, induced her not only to carry about on her travels hundreds of volumes, but at one time to take up seriously the study of the mysteries of bookbinding. One summer she spent in Germany, taking lessons in that craft, and in her library are a number of volumes, illuminated and bound by her own hands. She sings a little, plays the piano well, and has a well-grounded musical knowledge. Unlike many another successful actress--Mary Anderson, for instance--she retained her early strong love for her profession. “The rarest quality of Miss Marlowe’s art,” says Elizabeth McCracken, one of Miss Marlowe’s closest friends, with what is probably true insight, “is its lovely youthfulness. Her mirth is utterly young; at its gayest, it is tinged by a certain wistful gravity. Her woe is young, too; at its saddest, no drop of bitterness stains it. Children instinctively accept her as a kindred spirit, someone not so different from themselves as most grown-ups.” Add to this engaging youthfulness--another name, perhaps, for her sense of poetry--her dark and buoyant beauty, her rich voice that lent its own music to Shakespeare’s, and you have Julia Marlowe, not a genius, certainly, but one of America’s gracious women, who has brought beauty in many forms to the American stage in a period when, but for her, it had been sadly lacking. MAUDE ADAMS