I have always thought that there was a touch of pure genius in the job Grace Derring did with _The Truffler_. Particularly in her rewriting of the principal part. On the side of acting, it was unquestionably the best thing she had done--perhaps the best she will ever do. The situation was odd, at the start. Peter--writing, preaching, shouting at Sue---had let his personal irritation creep everywhere into the structure of the play. He was telling her what he thought she was--a truffler, a selfish girl, avoiding all of life's sober duties, interested only in the pursuit of dainties, experimenting with pleasurable emotions. He had written with heat and force; the structure of the piece was effective enough. The difficulty (which Grace had been quick to divine) was that he had made an unsympathetic character of his girl. The practical difficulty, I mean. I am not sure that the girl as Peter originally drew her was not a really brilliant bit of characterization. But on the American stage, as in the American novel, you must choose, always, between artistic honesty and “sympathy.” The part of commercial wisdom is to choose the latter. You may draw a harsh but noble character, a weak but likable character, you may picture cruelty and vice as a preliminary to Wesleyan conviction of sin and reformation; but never the unregenerate article. You may never be “unpleasant.” All this, of course, Peter knew. The adroit manipulating of sympathy was the thing, really, he did best. But when he wrote _The Truffler_ he was too excited over Sue and too irritated to write anything but his real thoughts. Therefore the play had more power, more of freshness and the surface sense of life, than anything else he had written up to that time. And therefore it was commercially impossible. Now Grace Herring was a bachelor girl herself. She knew the life. She had foregone the traditional duties--marriage, home-building, motherhood--in order to express her own life and gifts. She had loved--unwisely, too well--Peter. Like Peter, she approached the play in a state of nerves. As a practical player she knew that the girl would never win her audience unless grounds could be found for the audience to like her despite her Nietzschean philosophy. What she perhaps saw less clearly was that in her conception of the part she had to frame an answer to Peter's charges. Probably, almost certainly, she supposed the play something of a personal attack on her own life. Therefore she added her view of the girl to Peter's, and played her as a counter attack. If it had been real in the writing to Peter, it was quite as real in the playing to Grace. The result of this conflict of two aroused emotional natures was a brilliant theatrical success. Though I am not sure that the play, in its final form, meant anything. I am not sure. It was rather a baffling thing. But it stirred you, and in the third act, made you cry. Everybody cried in the third act.