Of the Mary Pickford who appeared in this cast as _Betty Warren_--and who gave an agreeable performance--Belasco affords this reminiscence, which it is specially pleasant to quote here because instances of appreciation and gratitude among actors of the present day are not frequent: “In ‘The Warrens of Virginia’ two children, a boy and a girl, had very important parts. I could not find a little girl to suit me, when one day my stage manager asked me if I would see a child named Mary Pickford. Little Mary was then a vision of girlish beauty--with long golden-brown curls. She said she had been hanging about my stage door for a week, wanted the part and was in fact at that very moment ready for it. I gave it to her at once, and the next day she came to rehearsal letter-perfect. In the course of time she became the ‘Queen of the Movies.’ After a few years I sent for her to ask her to play in ‘A Good Little Devil.’ She was then earning $500 a week, but she told me I might name my own price, as she knew I could not afford to pay that sum. She said she was willing to lose financially that she might gain artistically. I regret that she is giving her time to the moving-pictures houses, for she is a genius in her line.” “THE EASIEST WAY.” Mr. Eugene Walter’s play called “The Easiest Way” is one of the most obnoxious specimens of theatrical trash that have been obtruded on the modern Stage. It depicts a segment of experience in the life of a shallow, weak, and vain prostitute, who makes a feeble attempt to reform but who fails to do so. The significant impartment of that play--in so far as it possesses any significant impartment--is an intimation that “the easiest way” in which a woman can obtain and hold a position on the stage and live in luxury off it is by the sale of her chastity; but that “the easiest way” will, at last, prove to be the hardest, ending in misery and a broken heart. The ethical platitude is supposed to constitute a “moral lesson,” and this disgusting play was proclaimed as instructive and admonitory in its purpose. The assumption of a right and duty to “teach good moral lessons” in the Theatre by causing the public mind to dwell with tolerant familiarity on wholly commonplace and sordid proceedings and experiences of blackguards, rakes, pimps, and harlots, as such, is as stupid as it is impudent, but it has been made by some of the most eminent men and women of the Stage. Lester Wallack produced Boucicault’s tainted drama of “Forbidden Fruit,” and trailed the banner of the noble Wallack tradition in the gutter by doing so; Richard Mansfield, to the end of his life, retained in his repertory the feculent play of “A Parisian Romance” (produced by A. M. Palmer); Mme. Modjeska introduced in our Theatre Mr. Sudermann’s radically pernicious “Heimat” (“Magda”); William and Madge Kendal exploited the “Tanqueray”