The antique moralist, while gazing on that gorgeous spectacle,--“the teacup time of hood and hoop, or when the patch was worn,”--might, perhaps, be moved to inquire whether women, in their traffic with the impulses of love, the caprices of their own sex and the follies of the other, do really think and act as they are made to think and act in this play of Belasco’s: but, as the antique moralist knows nothing whatever about women, he would only bewilder himself by such interrogatory. Enough to know, in gazing on that spectacle, that it dazzles his vision and that the story pleases his fancy. He sees a woman to whom humdrum conventionality is intolerable; a woman who is fearless alike of vindictive feminine spite and insolent masculine tolerance; a woman who can be magnanimous; a woman who is nothing if not brilliant: and all this ought to content even a cynic. The dramatist has made _Kitty Bellairs_ much more of a woman and _Lord Verney_ much more of a man than they were in the Castle novel,--where, indeed, _Bellairs_ is unprincipled and heartless and _Verney_ foolish: a coarse flirt and a callow milksop. Evil influence may be incarnate, without evil deed. In the play this heroine is a thoroughly noble, gentle, and tender woman, underneath her panoply of mirth and mischief, and she acts from a good heart, and not from mere vanity and sensuous caprice. Miss Crosman entered into this character with absolute sympathy, and, as to the glittering side of it, so embodied it as to create a cogent effect of nature. There is an appeal made by _Kitty_ to her Irish and other military friends, when they behold her in apparent disgrace, that strikes the true note of pathos, and, in the speaking of this, Miss Crosman eloquently and nobly expressed the dignity of conscious virtue, while in the denotement of tenderness she much exceeded expectation,--because tenderness is not characteristic of her acting in general, the drift of her temperament and style setting toward pert assurance, skittish [Illustration: HENRIETTA CROSMAN AS _MISTRESS KITTY BELLAIRS_, IN “SWEET KITTY BELLAIRS” Photograph by Sarony. Belasco’s Collection. ]