“The third act is the test; I’ll try to say something after it, if it pleases them,” Richard told the delighted manager who made his impeded way into the poet’s box. When the curtain fell on the third act, after a moment’s hush the applause was tempestuous, and this time there was no resisting the enthusiastic shouts of “Author! Speech! Author!” Richard had not intended to resist his audience if it wanted him to talk after this act. He arose and patted little Anne’s shoulder in farewell. “Where are you going?” she asked. “I’m going on the stage, little Anne, and it might be as well to pray for me to say the right thing as to pray for the ladies of the shoulder blades,” said Richard, smiling. Little Anne at once closed her eyes, and obeyed him literally. Richard came forth from the side of the curtain, the same calm, gentle Richard that little Anne knew at home, and she heard Ted Wilberforce draw in his breath sharply. Richard stood bowing from left to right for a few minutes while the audience frantically welcomed him. The pathos of his blindness had never been more poignant. Then silence fell, the impressive silence of a concourse of people. “My friends,” Richard’s quiet, thrilling voice broke the silence, “it is not custom that makes me call you my friends. It seems to me that in your reception of my play there is a quality that means friendship for the man that wrote it. Or is it that I like to think so? I am deeply grateful to you. Having said that, I might stop talking, for what can I add? Truly, indeed, I thank you! The first night of his first play means a great deal to an author. It means pretty much what it must have meant to Wendy, John, and little Michael to be taken by Peter Pan into the Never Never Land. It means one’s dreams come true. “For three years I carried ‛The Guerdon’ around with me in vague, mist-encircled thoughts of it, a waking dream. Gradually the characters in it emerged farther and farther out of the mist, taking shape as the events of that period of their lives with which the play deals evolved and developed them. I knew what happened to these people because I knew the people, and, again, I knew the people because of what happened to them. “Perhaps we do not realize how much of us the events of our lives reveal. There are certain things that cannot befall people of a certain type, and the reverse is equally true: there are events almost sure to befall a certain type of people. The law of attraction, it seems to me, holds in all combinations, in all orders of creation. Circumstances develop from within outward. Though we are acted upon extraneously it is because we call forth and yield ourselves to the action.