"You're not an architect, you're a critic," he said to him early in their accidental acquaintance. "Now, I want to experiment on you. I want you to see Irving to-night and write your impressions of it. I have a notion you'll startle my readers." He did. His point of view, so modern, so uncompromising, so unshaded by tradition, delighted Anderson, and thereafter he was able to employ the young playwright regularly. These articles came to have a special value to the thoughtful "artists" of the stage, and were at last made into a little book, which sold several hundred copies, besides bringing him to the notice of a few congenial cranks and come-outers who met in an old tavern far down in the old city. These articles--this assumption of the superior air of the critic--led naturally to the determination to write a play to prove his theories, and now that the play was written and the trial about to be made his anxiety to win the public was very keen. He had a threefold reason for toiling like mad--to prove his theories, to gain bread, and to win Helen; and his concentration was really destructive. He could think of nothing else. All his correspondence ceased. He read no more; he went no more to his club. His only diversions were the rides and the lunches which he took with Helen. With her in the park he was a man transformed. His heaviness left him. His tongue loosened, and together they rose above the toilsome level of the rehearsal and abandoned themselves to the pure joy of being young. Together they visited the exhibitions of painting and sculpture, and to Helen these afternoons were a heavenly release from her own world. It made no difference to her who objected to her friendship with Douglass. After years of incredible solitude and seclusion and hard work in the midst of multitudes of admirers and in the swift-beating heart of cities, with every inducement to take pleasure, she had remained the self-denying student of acting. Her summers had been spent in England or France, where she saw no one socially and met only those who were interested in her continued business success. Now she abandoned this policy of reserve and permitted herself the joys of a young girl in company with a handsome and honorable man, denying herself even to the few. She played badly during these three weeks, and Westervelt was both sad and furious. Her joyous companionship with Douglass, her work on his sane and wholesome drama, their discussions of what the stage should be and do unfitted her for the factitious parts she was playing. "I am going to drop all of these characters into the nearest abyss," she repeated each time with greater intensity. "I shall never play them again after your drama is ready. My contract with Westervelt has really expired so far as his exclusive control over me is concerned, and I will not be coerced into a return to such work."