Prudence urges me here to forestall detection, by conceding that this
brief play has no pretension to "literary" quality. It is a piece in
its inception designed for, and in its making swayed by, the requirements
of the little theatre stage. The one virtue which anybody anywhere could
claim for _The Jewel Merchants_ is the fact that it "acts" easily and
rather effectively.

And candor compels the admission forthwith that the presence of this
anchoritic merit in the wilderness is hardly due to me. When circumstances
and the Little Theatre League of Richmond combined to bully me into
contriving the dramatization of a short story called _Balthazar's
Daughter_, I docilely converted this tale into a one-act play of which
you will find hereinafter no sentence. The comedy I wrote is now at one
with the lost dramaturgy of Pollio and of Posidippus, and is even less
likely ever to be resurrected for mortal auditors.

It read, I still think, well enough: I am certain that, when we came to
rehearse, the thing did not "act" at all, and that its dialogue, whatever
its other graces, had the defect of being unspeakable. So at each
rehearsal we--by which inclusive pronoun I would embrace the actors and
the producing staff at large, and with especial (metaphorical) ardor Miss
Louise Burleigh, who directed all--changed here a little, and there a
little more; and shifted this bit, and deleted the other, and "tried out"
everybody's suggestions generally, until we got at least the relief of
witnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my manuscript
was enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge of legibility,
as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten yesterday,
the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the gist but not
the phrasing of what was meant) delivered naturally.