Never, however, before or since, has Miss Adams’ popularity risen to such a pitch as it did upon the production of _Peter Pan_. First produced in 1905, it ran for three seasons, and when Miss Adams revived it recently and took it far and wide about the country it proved as popular as ever. It may be, as Mr. Winter says, “immeasurably inferior, in fancy and satire, to _Alice in Wonderland_.” But then, Mr. Winter found it at times puerile and tedious, and could discern nothing in it but a diversion for children. _That_ it certainly was, but the children’s ages ran from four to fourscore. It was a matter of common observation, even in that supposed center of case-hardened worldliness, New York, that the audiences were largely of grown-ups, and that stock-brokers, “tired business men,” and others who would flee miles from the ordinary “children’s play,” came not once, but thrice, a dozen times, in some cases, to see the triumph of Peter over Captain Hook. The elfin quality, the gracious charm and warm-hearted humor of Miss Adams’ _Peter Pan_ may not have been sufficient to make it, as a feat of acting, her most memorable achievement; but play and player have won their way into the public’s affections more thoroughly than anything else she has done--more even than _The Little Minister_. In another Barrie play, _What Every Woman Knows_--produced after the comparatively short life of _The Jesters_, a romantic mediæval play in which she displayed her familiar ability without working any great advance or change--Miss Adams accomplished what remains as probably the most noteworthy acting, _as acting_, of her career. She entered thoroughly into the part of Maggie Wylie--the Scotch woman who, while regaining, in a novel way, her errant husband, demonstrates again “what every woman knows,”--the dependence of mere man upon woman. The play was a delightful instance of Barrie’s gift for dressing human truths in whimsical fancy; Miss Adams, in the well chosen words of Mr. Winter, combined “goodness, tenderness, magnanimity, pride, motherhood, and pity with some little dash of tartness,--and gave a performance which needed only flexibility and more essential Scotch character to make it as entirely enjoyable as it was artistically consistent.”[210]