“The Wife” received 239 consecutive performances. Yet the fate of that play hung, for some time, in the balance. “I knew, even before the production,” said Belasco to me, “that it was too long and too loosely jointed, but I felt it could make good; and Mr. Frohman had faith. De Mille was pretty well discouraged after a week or ten days, and he told me he expected he’d have to go back to school-teaching [De Mille had been a school-teacher before he joined the Madison Square Theatre, where, in 1884, Belasco first met him]. Brent Good, proprietor of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, and also Stickney protested, in a directors’ meeting, that the play was a failure and was losing money and ordered it withdrawn.” The next morning Daniel Frohman instructed Belasco to put the play of “Featherbrain,” by James Albery, into rehearsal and prepare it for production as rapidly as possible. “I felt certain,” Belasco has told me, “that ’The Wife’ could be made a great money-getter, and I resolved it should have a fair trial: I held back on the preparations of ’Featherbrain’ all I could,--and, meantime, De Mille and I altered and cut, day after day, on our play. This procedure was justified by the result. Writing on this subject, Belasco declares: “It seemed to us that for every word we cut from ’The Wife’ we gained a person in the orchestra.” What a pity the necessary pruning and adjustment could not have been done before the production! Then the prosperity of a theatre and of many persons would not have been endangered. The sum of more than $50,000, owed to the Tiffany Studios, was paid in full, out of the profits of “The Wife,” and the directors of the corporation, as also Daniel Frohman, were so well satisfied with the ultimate result that Belasco and De Mille were commissioned to write the next new play required, for the following season, which was to be one constructed as a starring vehicle for Edward H. Sothern, who had been “inherited” by the Lyceum management under a contract with Helen Dauvray. REVISION OF “SHE.” The first dramatic work done by Belasco, after he had dismissed “The Wife,” was a revision of a drama called “She,” made by William H. Gillette on the basis of Rider Haggard’s novel of that name. This was produced, November 29, 1887, at Niblo’s Garden, New York, by Isaac B. Rich and Al. Hayman.