All very gratifying: To Lillian, however, one of the most satisfactory features of her new venture was the absence of the money element—always, after the Griffith days, a foremost consideration. The word “salary” had never been mentioned between her and Mr. Harris. She did not even know what she was to have until she got her envelope at the end of the week. * * * * * It was a gray afternoon, in the little den which has become so much a part of our story, that Lillian recounted these things. She owed a heavy debt to Ruth Gordon, she insisted, and thought of Helena as “Ruth’s child.” And just here came one of those coincidences which are always being popped into plays and stories. In another room, the telephone rang. A maid appeared at the door. “Will you speak to Miss Gordon?” she said. II HELENA IN NEW YORK The New Haven Register, after commenting on the “superb piece of staging done by Jed Harris, and the quite indescribable beauty and magic of Lillian Gish’s performance as Helena,” spoke of “Uncle Vanya” as “surely one of the few really great plays in existence ... a richly polyphonic drama, in which one watches the drift and flow of human life as one listens to the different voices in a Bach fugue.” True enough, though “Uncle Vanya” is hardly a play at all, but a succession of incidents with no more plot than a picture, which is precisely what it is—a tapestry of exquisite workmanship, a cartoon of human futility—in this case, on a Russian farm. Mark Twain once wrote: “God, who could have made every one of His children happy ... yet never made a single happy one.”