"The curtain later fell in silence on what should have been an impressive climax for Ada Rehan, and was lifted a single time after the ushers had incited a mild demonstration of personal regard for that favorite.
"It has never been customary to have at Daly's any other actress of dramatic strength than Miss Rehan. The rôles secondary in serious importance have been played by charming but weak young women. As soon as rivalry began, as in the case of Maxine Elliott, it was removed.
"In the sensational melodrama from Drury Lane, with the singularly felicitous title or sub-title of 'The Kiss of Blood,' is a Russian adventuress, who has an honest love affair, though she is a thief, and who is the only female character to figure in the heroics of the play. Miss Bates was assigned to it.
"She had come from California, and was unknown here. She proved to be handsome, fiery, forceful, and very talented. She was a revelation to the first audience, and it was disposed to go wild over her.
"Maybe it would have been better for Miss Rehan if the part had been given to her. Perhaps she had disliked to enact a wicked woman. Anyway, she had chosen instead to appear as a vain, frivolous, but clean and cheerful, wife of a London tradesman.
"This had been written as an eccentric character, and at the Drury Lane it had been played with irresistible drollery by Mrs. John Wood. But Miss Rehan had no mind to look grotesque, and as to low comedy, it is clear out of her line.
"In a serio-comic scene of somnambulism, where Mrs. Wood had been a fright in curl papers and a funny nightgown, Miss Rehan sacrificed nothing to the comic requirements. She was as dignified and stately as any Lady Macbeth. For those reasons the sleep-walking episode, which had been very valuable in London, counted for nothing here, and at its end the actress had good reason to know that it had failed with the audience.
"It was then that experts foretold the withdrawal of the California actress. She appeared at Daly's only one more night. She had not found Daly's Theater comfortable."
Naturally, Miss Bates did not long remain without an engagement. She was snapped up by the Lieblers for Miladi in "The Musketeers," and soon caught the eye of Belasco, who featured her in "Under Two Flags." Her real arrival, however, was with "The Darling of the Gods," which brought her seven hundred and fifty dollars a week salary and a percentage of the receipts, not a mean advance from the twenty dollars she had been getting from Frawley less than five years before.