_Burton Temple_ Charles Richman. _Marshfield Craven_ John W. Cope. _Robert Granger_ Howell Hansel. _Anna_ Blanche Bates. _Mrs. Mason_ Loretta Wells. “The Fighting Hope” served as a professional vehicle for Miss Bates during two seasons. On October 24, 1910, at the Euclid Avenue Opera House, Cleveland, Ohio, Belasco presented her in “Nobody’s Widow,” by Mr. Avery Hopwood: that play was first acted in New York, November 14, that year, at the Hudson Theatre, with the following cast: _Roxana Clayton_ Blanche Bates. _Betty Jackson_ Adelaide Prince. _Countess Manuela Valencia_ Edith Campbell. _Fanny Owens_ Dorothy Shoemaker. _Duke of Moreland_ Bruce McRae. _Ned Stephens_ Rex McDougall. _Baron Reuter_ Henry Schumann-Heink. _Peter_ Westhrop Saunders. Both those plays, though they enjoyed profitable careers, were, in fact, stop-gaps: they had never been produced but that “the strong necessity of the times enforced”: “Blanche wanted to appear in ‘drawing-room’ drama,” Belasco has said to me; “I was hard pressed and I took what I could get.” Both those plays owed their profitable careers entirely to Belasco,--to his unremitting and unacknowledged diligence in the labor of revising them and making them feasible for stage use and to the perfection of detail with which he invested their production and caused them to be acted. A whimsical remark which he once made to me, in conversation about another play, applies with force to both these ventures: “I have,” he said, “first and last, paid many authors handsome royalties for the privilege of working like a slave on their plays, without credit and generally without thanks, and making them into popular successes. Each time I have solemnly sworn I’ll never do it again--yet, somehow, I do! But I live in hope that some day somebody will bring me a _finished play_ that only needs production.”