But Miss Barrymore had it in her to be a real actress. Once in a while, prompted by her ambition, she would do something that her fond followers would think was queer. Thus, during this decade, from 1900 to 1910, in the midst of her prosperous playing of popular pieces, she acted at one time or another _Carrots_, a one-act play from the French in which she gave a pathetic picture of the boy-hero; then, at a single plunge, Ibsen’s _A Doll’s House_; then _Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_, a play that Barrie wrote for Ellen Terry, and in which Miss Barrymore, to the consternation of her peculiar public, appeared as a gray-haired matron; and finally _The Silver Box_, an unrelievedly serious and honest play by Galsworthy, in which she descended to the depths by acting an ordinary scrub-woman. Not all of these did Miss Barrymore play signally well; her starship, limiting her to a play or two per year, had simply not afforded her the training to become the actress she has since shown herself to be. But in these brief experiments at least she was feeling her way out of the entanglements of theatrical pettiness. When Miss Barrymore, in January, 1910, appeared in Pinero’s _Mid-Channel_, she had married and become a mother. Whether the admirers of her former girlish charm and slenderness liked it or not, she was now inevitably a deeper-natured and more mature woman and, consequently, capable of deeper and better acting. The fact was speedily proved in _Mid-Channel_. The play is a grim tragedy of English middle-class life, in which a fine-natured wife, after a gradual course of unhappy, deteriorating life with a selfish and sensual husband, ends her problems with suicide;--surely not one of the pretty Barrymore parts. “There will be hosts of the ‘Barrymore public,’ no doubt, who will feel that in _Mid-Channel_ they cannot laugh with her,” wrote Walter Prichard Eaton. “But to some more thoughtful men and women it is a source of rare satisfaction that at last the promise of that lovely voice and expressive face has been fulfilled, and you can weep with her, suffer with her, understand through the spell of her acting a little better the sorrows and perplexities of our frail humanity. In short, Miss Barrymore has become an actress.... Her many admirers, gathered in force, who evidently knew more about her than they cared about Pinero, were disposed to laugh in the first act during the scenes of her bickerings. But never after that did she allow them to suppose for an instant that they were not watching a serious and passionate study of a woman’s tragedy.”