“I never regretted anything more than being forced to bring suit against Fairbank. He was courteous, kind-hearted, mellow, and human. I am sure that when he and his wife started to aid Mrs. Carter it was their intention to see her through. I met him in after years, and in the course of conversation he admitted that all I had done for Mrs. Carter was done wisely. ’It’s too horrible,’ he said. ’I was badly advised by my friends. You should never have been obliged to carry, the matter into the courts.’” A POVERTY-STRICKEN STRUGGLE. When Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Dudley, her mother, returned to New York after the demise of “The Ugly Duckling,” in Kansas City (1891), they established their residence at No. 63 Clinton Place. Belasco lodged at No. 126 Waverley Place, and almost immediately he resumed his project of writing, unaided, a new play specially designed for the use of Mrs. Carter. Having no convenient place of his own in which to work, he obtained the use of a room in Mrs. Dudley’s apartment, in which to write his play, and there he completed the first draft of “The Heart of Maryland,” and incidentally continued his tuition of Mrs. Carter. I remember seeing them once at about that period at Delmonico’s old restaurant, Twenty-sixth Street, where I chanced to be dining with Augustin Daly and Ada Rehan, and years afterward, on one of the few occasions when I have personally met Mrs. Carter, she mentioned remembering the same incident, saying it was so unusual for them, in those days of trouble, to visit that pleasant place. They were, she added, celebrating some little favorable turn in their prospects; “I looked at Mr. Daly and Miss Rehan,” said Mrs. Carter, “and whispered to ’Mr. Dave,’ ’Shall _we_ ever “get there” and be, like them, successful and accepted?’” To which, she said, Belasco confidently answered, “Of course we shall!” Speaking to me lightly of that period of ordeal, which was, in fact, a bitterly afflicting one for him to endure, Belasco said: “But Delmonico’s was not for us in those days: my family were, fortunately for them, in San Francisco, and many a time,--habitually, in fact,--Mrs. Carter and her mother and I ’dined’ at a twenty-five cent _table d’hôte_ on Fourth Avenue--and were lucky to dine anywhere. We had put all we had into launching and exploiting Mrs. Carter, and those two women were hard put to it to keep their Clinton Place apartment. As for me,--well, I had, of course, some income from my plays, and I gave private coaching to beginners and professionals, anybody who would employ me (among others, by the way, Georgia Cayvan, who always liked to have me rehearse her, even after I left the Lyceum), and I kept going, after a fashion; but I had expenses heavier than my resources would meet, and I was most of the time poorer than I like to remember--and all the time I was harassed with anxiety.”