“And what did you think of it?”
“Oh, I? Now tell me, mon, do you make a guid thing of it?”
“I do pretty well.”
“Ye do?” said the caddie. “Then my advice to ye is, to drop golf—ye’ll never make a living at that.”
Mrs. Welch is a daughter of Lottie Venne, one of the best women comedians we ever had on the English stage—a frequent visitor to us at one time, as was that fine actress, Fanny Brough (Mrs. Boleyn), an eminent member of an eminent family, whom we first met at an Idler tea.
At the Idler, too, we met the Beringers, of whom we saw a good deal at that time—Mrs. Oscar Beringer, the playwright, and her daughters Esme and Vera, who were both on the stage. Vera, the younger, has followed in her mother’s footsteps, and written plays—one with Morley Roberts. Esme, who is very popular both as a woman and an actress, has played in a large number of parts with an unvarying success.
We knew Beatrice (Robbie) Ferrar much better than either of her sisters, though all three came to our at-homes, just as they were all three on the stage. Though she had been on the stage six years when we met her, she still looked a mere child. She was for years one of the best ingénue actresses (for which her pretty, small features, bright colouring and demure expression, gave her natural advantages) on the stage. She was one of the most familiar figures at the Idler functions.
Rowena Jerome, who has scored several successes in her father’s plays, was only a little child, playing horses, remarkably clever and precocious, in the days when we were going to the Idler teas and Jerome’s house in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood.
Among other actors and actresses we met at the Idler teas or at Jerome’s were Ian (Forbes) Robertson and his wife, and their daughter, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson, Nina Boucicault, the Henry Arthur Jones’s, Kate and Mary Rorke, Olga Nethersole, George Hawtrey, Lindo and Phyllis Broughton. I saw Phyllis Broughton the other day, looking absolutely the same as the very first time she ever came to our flat, twenty years ago, the gentlest-faced actress I ever met.
Forbes-Robertson’s brother, Ian Robertson (who never used the name of Forbes himself, though his pretty daughter Beatrice resumed it when she went on the stage), came to us less frequently than his wife and daughter, who were habituées.