However this may be, there were also people who said that the Legitimate Theatre under the management of Mrs. Mowbray could not have been so great a financial failure, after all; for Mrs. Mowbray, when her season came to an end, wore as expensive dresses as ever, and drove as expensive horses as ever; and as everyone who had been associated with the enterprise had been paid—some people said overpaid—the natural assumption was that Shakespeare on the stage was not so abhorrent to the people of England as was generally supposed.
The people who took this view of the matter were people who had never heard the name of Mr. Archie Brown—people who regarded Mrs. Mowbray as a self-sacrificing lady who had so enthusiastic a desire to make the public acquainted with the beauties of Shakespeare, that she was quite content to spend her own fortune (wherever that came from) in producing “Cymbeline” and other masterpieces at the Legitimate.
There were other people who said that Archie Brown was a young ass.
There were others who said that Mrs. Mowbray was a harpy.
There were others still—they were mostly men—who said that Mrs. Mowbray was the handsomest woman in England.
The bitterest—they were mostly women—said that she was both handsome and a harpy.
The truth regarding the difficult question of the Legitimate Theatre was gathered by Harold Wynne, as he swallowed his claret and ate his olives at the dining table at Archie Birown’s rooms in Piccadilly.
He perceived from what Archie told him, that Archie had a genuine enthusiasm in the cause of Shakespeare. How he had acquired it, he might have had considerable difficulty in explaining. He also gathered that Mrs. Mowbray cared very little for Shakespeare except as a medium for impressing upon the public the fact—she believed it to be a fact—that Mrs. Mowbray was the most beautiful woman in England.
“Cymbeline” had, she considered, been written in the prophetic instinct, which the author so frequently manifested, that one day a woman with such shapely limbs as Mrs. Mowbray undoubtedly possessed, might desire to exhibit them to the public of this grand old England of Shakespeare’s and ours.
Mrs. Mowbray was probably the most expensive taste that any man in England could entertain.