_Paul Barton_ William Morris. _Lulu Wheeler_ Jane Grey. _Carrie_ Helen Ferguson. “Jane Cowl,” said Belasco, “had been with me for several years, understudying many parts in different plays, acting ‘bits,’ and working hard. I felt that she had earned her chance, and I gave it to her in ‘Matrimony.’ Her performance was splendid and she has been successful ever since.” “The Lily” is a play in four acts, adapted by Belasco from a French original, “Le Lys,” by MM. Pierre Wolff and Gaston Leroux. It was produced for the first time, December 6, 1909, at the Belasco Theatre, Washington, and was first acted in New York, at the Stuyvesant, December 23. The story of this play is one of domestic tyranny, possible in France but impossible in America, and one which, accordingly, inspired only tepid interest in the American public,--although the treatment and presentation of it were in a high degree theatrically effective. This is the substance of that story: The _Comte de Maigny_, a profligate Frenchman who is also a father and a widower, tyrannizes over his children. The eldest of those children, _Odette_, is “the lily,”--a woman of thirty-five who, in girlhood, has been parted by her father from the man she wished to marry and who has become a mere domestic convenience, dwelling in lonely celibacy as her father’s housekeeper and lavishing her affection upon her sister, who is ten years younger. That sister, _Christiane_, is destined by their father for the same barren existence, but she meets a strolling artist, who wins her love and with whom, because he cannot wed her,--being already married to an uncongenial woman who will not divorce him,--she enters into an illicit relation. _De Maigny_ has contrived to arrange a loveless marriage between his son and the young daughter of a man of great wealth,--being intent thus to obtain money for libidinous self-indulgence. The relation of _Christiane_ and her artist becoming known to that person, he breaks off the marriage of his daughter with _Christiane’s_ brother, not explicitly stating his reason but with ambiguous givings out which intimate it. The chief scenes of the play then follow. The infuriated licentiate badgers his unfortunate daughter, who, at first, lies to protect herself, until, at last, he elicits from her a rebellious, exultant declaration of the truth. Then, in the fury of his disappointed cupidity, he is about to beat her, when the long-suppressed, meek-seeming but actually passionate _Odette_, opening her valves under an immense and rising pressure of emotional steam, intervenes, denouncing the conventions of society in general and the iniquities of _de Maigny_ in particular, certifying to the propriety of her sister’s conduct in the wretched circumstances existing, and declaring her purpose to protect that sister in her natural desire for “love and happiness.” _Christiane_ then departs with her lover and the expectation