The success of _The Masked Ball_ was not repeated at once, not until four years later, indeed, when _Rosemary_ gave both Mr. Drew and Miss Adams excellent opportunities. In the meantime she had had occasional small triumphs, and only one approach to downright failure--in _The Squire of Dames_. In this play she had the part of a flippant, heartless young society woman, and, truth to tell, she didn’t do much with it. In the _Bauble Shop_, however, she had had an opportunity for her simplicity and pathos, while in _That Imprudent Young Couple_ she rose superior to the play, and prompted this criticism: “That Miss Adams was able to interest her audience at all last night was due entirely to the charm of her own personality. Her work is still exceptional in its daintiness and its simplicity.... She has found the short cut from laughter into tears. It is good to see that the remarkable success that has come to this young actress has not turned her head.” As for _Rosemary_, the last play of the John Drew-Maude Adams period, it is to be said that it is one of the most charming of the many plays of its gifted and long-laboring author, Louis N. Parker. It is a pleasantly old-fashioned, idyllic comedy of the England of Victoria’s accession, and seems to have disclosed equally Miss Adams’s gifts of comedy and of pathos;--a play well suited to her middle period. At this time James M. Barrie was in America. He was planning the dramatization of his novel _The Little Minister_. He saw Miss Adams as Dorothy and marked her at once as the woman to play his Lady Babbie. Mr. Frohman already had half-formed plans for promoting her, and the opportunity to play _The Little Minister_ came just at the right moment. Mr. Drew was deprived of his popular leading woman, and on September 13, 1897, at the Lafayette Square Opera House in Washington (and two weeks later at the Empire in New York) Maude Adams was launched upon her career as a “star.” The success of play and player was immediate and great, for on this occasion began that combination of dramatist and actress--Barrie and Maude Adams--that has proved so singularly appealing,--not only in this play, but in _Quality Street_, in _Peter Pan_, _What Every Woman Knows_, and in _The Legend of Leonora_.[204]