Before we leave the subject, another change which I was obliged to make will interest you, because it shows very curiously what queer turns these laws of dramatic construction may take. As soon as it was decided to have Lilian live, in the fifth act, and love John Strebelow, I was compelled to cut out the quarrel-scene between Lilian and Harold Routledge in the first act. This is a little practical matter, very much like taking out a certain wheel at one end of a machine because you have decided to get a different mechanical result at the other end. I was very fond of this quarrel-scene, but I lost no time in trying to save it, for I saw at once that Harold Routledge must not appear in the first act at all. He could only be talked about as Lilian's lover. John Strebelow must be present alone in the eyes and sympathy of the audience. If Routledge did not appear until the second act, the audience would regard him as an interloper; it would rather resent his presence than otherwise, and would be easily reconciled to his death in the next act. It was taking an unfair advantage of a young lover; but there was no help for it. Even if Harold had appeared in the first act, the quarrel-scene would have been impossible. He might have made love to Lilian, perhaps, or even kissed her, and the audience would have forgiven me reluctantly for having her love another man afterward. But if the two young people had a lover's quarrel in the presence of the audience, no power on earth could have convinced any man or woman in the house that they were not intended for each other by the eternal decrees of divine Providence. I have now given you the revised story of this play as it was produced at the Union Square Theater in New York, under the name of the 'Banker's Daughter.' I have said nothing about the comic scenes or characters, because the various changes did not affect them in any way that concerns the principles of dramatic art. They are almost identically the same in both versions. Now, if you please, we will cross the ocean. I have had many long discussions with English managers on the practice in London of adapting foreign plays, not merely to the English stage, but to English life, with English characters. The Frenchmen of a French play become, as a rule, Englishmen; so do Italians and Spaniards and Swedes. They usually, however, continue to express foreign ideas and to act like foreigners. In speaking of such a transplanted character, I may be permitted to trifle with a sacred text: The manager has said it, But it's hardly to his credit, That he is an Englishman! For he ought to have been a Roosian, A French, or Turk, or Proosian, Or perhaps I-tali-an! But in spite of Art's temptations, To belong to other nations, He becomes an Englishman!