After the inglorious failure of _Lear_, they tried _She Stoops to Conquer_, with Cecilia Pyce, an English actress of advancing years and a large and bony physique, whom MacNaughton much vaunted. Brainard suspected that Cissie, as Mac called her, had been the Scotsman’s sweetheart in her palmier days, and thus he was now paying his sentimental debts by giving her a lucrative position at his patron’s expense. However, nothing better offered at present, and Miss Pyce at least knew how to act in the solid old English fashion. The people came sparingly, and sat in the first four rows of the big auditorium, which was a lonesome sort of place these days. It was little better when the company essayed an “original American play”—as it was advertised—that Farson had culled from the mass of manuscripts he had examined. _May Magic_ lasted a week, and then fell to pieces before an audience consisting of the author and about twenty of his friends. The management could not even give their tickets away. At _May Magic_ the critics took final leave of the People’s Theater with such parting kicks as this: What in the name of common sense is the amateurish aggregation at the so-called People’s Theater trying to do? In what sense is it a popular theater? The “people” are conspicuous by their absence. The worthy gentleman who is spending his money giving the public fifth-rate productions of English classics and such rejected modern masterpieces as _May Magic_ had better go over to Broadway and learn his trade. Brainard was thankful that Louisiana was safe on the high seas on her way to Munich, and would not see this article! Somewhere Farson ran across a statuesque young woman of German extraction who spoke English as if she had a cracker in her mouth, and became persuaded that the mission of their organization was to introduce to the American public the new plays of the advanced European theater. “We must become the theater of ideas,” he said to Brainard. So, with the assistance of Miss Beatrice Klinker in leading roles, the People’s Theater became frankly “highbrow” and went after Brieux, Hauptmann, Strindberg, and the tribe of the peculiar. Brainard poured out money like water in buying rights at exorbitant prices, in preparing new scenery, and in expensive additions to the company. He foresaw that at this rate, instead of starting a chain of popular theaters across the continent, he would have all he could do to maintain one organization in New York, with possibly a couple of road companies. For the receipts were always negligible. To such comparatively modest limits had his great Idea already shrunken. If he had not thus far succeeded in enlightening any large section of the American Public in dramatic art, he himself had received a very thorough and costly lesson, not merely in the drama, but in human nature and life. That, however, had not been his purpose!