"If you ever love a man," she said, "you'll know one doesn't think in years. One simply feels—in minutes."
XIV
Alexandra did not have to avail herself of Maggy's offer of her car for the purpose of visiting the various agencies. That evening she received a post-card from Stannard requesting her to call on Mrs. Hugh Lambert at her house in South Kensington. Mrs. Lambert's name was familiar to her as that of the wife of a leading actor-manager on whose stage she was never seen. She toured the provinces with plays of her own, while he remained in London or visited New York, in both of which cities he was the idol of a vast number of impressionable women.
You could hardly pick up an illustrated paper without finding Hugh Lambert's photograph in it. You could buy picture post-cards of him at every shop where such things are on sale—full-face, in profile, in costume, out of costume, head and shoulders, half-length, full-length. How he was able to devote so much time to being photographed and yet get a reasonable amount of sleep was a mystery that did not seem capable of explanation. He was immensely popular and very good-looking in an effeminate way. Before arriving at the dignity of actor-management his talent for poetic interpretation had been freely recognized. But success had spoilt him. Now he was mannered. Costume parts were his hobby. The story went that, at one of his dress-rehearsals in which he was figuring as a Roman general in gilded armor, he asked a lady present what she thought of his appearance, and that her answer had been: "Oh, Mr. Lambert, what a girl you are for clothes!"
As Lambert's reputation had increased, so that of his wife had diminished. At one time she had promised to develop into an actress of renown. But for some reason difficult to understand she never quite succeeded. The critics said she lacked "personal magnetism," that touch of attractiveness that gets the actress's individuality across the footlights. The fact remains that she failed to please the public in the big roles that fell to her in her husband's productions. London dropped her, and Hugh Lambert's name blazed alone in colored electric lights across the front of his theater.
Then came a whisper of his marital infidelity. The couple separated. From this time onwards Mrs. Lambert was seldom seen on the London stage.
Her career was a disappointing one. None knew it better than herself. Technically and emotionally she was a finer actress than her husband's leading lady, finer indeed than most of the leading ladies of other managers. That she became a great attraction in the Provinces was nothing to her. She loathed the Provinces, their inadequate theaters, their inferior hotels, and the incessant traveling. At thirty-five she found herself as it were back at the collar-work of her earlier days of struggle, and without its compensations. Then, conjugal affection and the stimulus of ambition still unachieved had made touring bearable and often enjoyable because she shared it with Lambert.
Now she was alone.
She hated the sordid manufacturing towns and their unsophisticated audiences, the eternal sameness of the self-vaunted watering-places, the dull spas where fashionable frequenters of the pump room would condescend to patronize her whom they would not pay to see in London. She was a tired woman.
To her came Alexandra at eleven o'clock on the morning appointed. She had quite forgotten, until her maid brought her up the card, that she had asked Stannard to find her a small-part actress who would also be useful as a companion. She saw Alexandra at once.