According to thrice-repeated tales, which her mother has recently taken occasion to deny, it was only after a discouraging period of waiting and of fruitless visits to managers, that Miss Adams got her first opportunity, when _The Paymaster_ had run its course. A more tangible tradition is to the effect that while awaiting something better Miss Adams worked for a while as a ballet girl.[200] According to Mrs. Adams, Maude had not long been in New York when Daniel Frohman offered her a position in the company supporting E. H. Sothern. Virginia Harned took up the cause of the young actress, and introduced her to Mr. Sothern. “I must have been a strangely unattractive and unclassified creature at the time,” says Miss Adams, “too young for mature parts and too old for child impersonations. Miss Harned, who had played child parts with me, had succeeded in interesting Mr. Sothern in me and one great day I was invited to dine with them in a public restaurant. I am sure that I disgusted Mr. Sothern with my unconquerable bashfulness and awkwardness. Painfully diffident, I scarcely uttered a word during the whole of that dinner. Nonetheless I was soon afterward engaged to play in the Sothern company.”[201] The engagement with Sothern was brief, however, like all that had gone before. Not until she was given the part of Dot Bradbury in Hoyt’s farce _A Midnight Bell_ (in March 1889) did circumstances combine to give her a good part, a long engagement, and some public notice. Until now she was quite unknown to the public at large. But she played this part through the spring and all during the following season. Discerning playgoers, and a critic here and there, began to speak of her as one of the promising youngsters of the stage, and what was more important, she attracted the attention of Charles Frohman, who in the fall of 1890 was organizing a stock company for the Twenty-third Street Theatre. Mr. Frohman gave Miss Adams a place in this company, and from that day until his death--twenty-four years--she remained under his management.