On June 15, 1900, Belasco entered into an agreement with the English fiction writer Egerton Castle by which he obtained optional rights of producing dramatizations of five novels by that author and his wife and collaborator, Agnes Castle. He relinquished his rights in four of those novels, “Young April,” “The Pride of Jennico,” “The Star Dreamer,” and “The Secret Orchard,” but he exercised them with regard to a fifth, “The Bath Comedy,” upon which he based a play. His purpose, originally, was to bring forth Blanche Bates in its central character, when “The Darling of the Gods” should have ceased to hold public interest. Many reasons, however,--chief among them desire to please Mr. Castle by an early production,--caused him to change his plan. He, accordingly, in January, 1903, engaged the accomplished actress Miss Henrietta Crosman to assume the principal part in the play which he had founded on Mr. Castle’s story, and, on November 23, of the same year, at the Lafayette Square Opera House, Washington, D. C., he produced it for the first time, under the title of “Sweet Kitty Bellairs.” Pursuant of what was, I am convinced, a deliberate plan to harass Belasco and hinder him in his managerial enterprises, the lawsuit instituted by Joseph Brooks (incidents of which have already been recounted) was brought almost in the moment of that first performance. Belasco, however, had grown accustomed to persecution and remained unperturbed by it. On being notified, November 24, of Brooks’s allegation in the matter and asked for a statement, he dismissed the subject in two sentences: “It is,” he said, “a pack of lies, and I am too busy with this production [“Bellairs”] to make any answer to these persons [meaning Brooks and his associates] now. When I am disengaged I will make a reply.” Belasco’s presentment of his “Sweet Kitty Bellairs,”--made for the first time in New York, December 9, 1903, at the Belasco Theatre,--revealed a comedy as well as a spectacle, because, while it satiated the vision with luxuriance of ornament and color, it set a truthful and piquant picture of manners in the jewelled framework of a story generally credible and always romantic as well as at once humorous and tender, merry and grave. The central purpose of it is the display of a study in womanhood, an exceptional female character, a peculiar and fascinating type; and the predominant attribute of it, accordingly, is sexuality. The dashing coquette of old English fiction lives again in his _Kitty Bellairs_,--not precisely _Lady Froth_, _Lady Bellaston_, _Mrs. Rackett_ or _Mrs. Delmaine_, but a purified, glorified ideal of those gay, tantalizing, roguish dames, a creature of sensuous beauty and reckless behavior, whose whole occupation in life is the bewitchment of man; and, in a silver fabric of gossamer comedy, this siren and all her associates are engaged in adjusting their amatory relations. In other words, this is a play of intrigue.