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Precious Things. On the eve of World War I, the twinkle of her star began to fade. Frohman went to his death on the Lusitania. Barrie wrote no more plays for her. There were a few revivals, one or two new plays, a radio program or two. She spent a year in General Electric's laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., experimenting with new ideas on stage lighting. For five years she taught drama at Missouri's Stephens College. She even tried lecturing (said she in Manhattan's Town Hall in 1939: "Emotions are the nicest things we have . . . and the most dangerous").
She never married, turned over her Long Island estate to an order of Roman Catholic nuns, and lived quietly with a companion, Margaret McKenna, in a house in New York's Catskill Mountains. Greying heads never forgot her. Wrote Critic Alexander Woollcott in 1940: "I can recall her every intonation, her every gesture, her every bit of business . . . Maude Adams in The Little Minister! Bless me! I still can hear the music of her laughter as she danced in the moonlight [and] see the toss of her head in the firelight in Nanny Webster's cottage . . . Maude Adams in The Little Minister . . . 'What a time of years! What a time of years!' ':
One day last week the aged actress lay down on a couch in her home and called to her friend: "I don't feel so good, Miss McKenna. Don't go away from me." A little while later, Maude Adams, at 80, was dead.