'However, on the way home she had another and a pleasanter surprise for me. A carriage was waiting for us on the main road, and we strolled towards it through the gorse and the trees and the rich level evening lights. I dropped behind for some primroses still lingering in bloom beside a little brook; she stayed too, and we were together, out of ear-shot of the rest.
'"Mr. Kendal," she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers to her, "you may have misunderstood something just now. I don't want to pretend to what I haven't got. I don't know French, and I can't read French novels if I wished to ever so much."
'What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly,
having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself.
I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenly
I thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.
'"Well," I said deliberately, walking on beside her; "you lose a good deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you full into the mid-European stream—you feel it flowing, you are brought into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth, he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such force of representation! It's the same with their novels as with their theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the world. They don't shirk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether it's acting, or painting, or writing. You've never seen Desforêts, I think?—no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again. What a pity!"
'Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. "I am not sorry," she said. "Nothing would have induced me to go and see her."
'"Indeed!" I said, waiting a little curiously for what she would say next.
'"It's not that I am jealous of her," she exclaimed, with a quick proud look at me; "not that I don't believe she's a great actress; but I can't separate her acting from what she is herself. It is women like that who bring discredit on the whole profession—it is women like that who make people think that no good woman can be an actress. I resent it, and I mean to take the other line. I want to prove, if I can, that a woman may be an actress and still be a lady, still be treated just as you treat the women you know and respect! I mean to prove that there need never be a word breathed against her, that she is anybody's equal, and that her private life is her own, and not the public's! It makes my blood boil to hear the way people—especially men—talk about Madame Desforêts; there is not one of you who would let your wife or your sister shake hands with her, and yet how you rave about her, how you talk as if there were nothing in the world but genius—and French genius!"
'It struck me that I had got to something very much below the surface in Miss Bretherton. It was a curious outburst; I remembered how often her critics had compared her to Desforêts, greatly to her disadvantage. Was this championship of virtue quite genuine? or was it merely the best means of defending herself against a rival by the help of British respectability?
'"Mme. Desforêts," I said, perhaps a little drily, "is a riddle to her best friends, and probably to herself; she does a thousand wild, imprudent, bad things if you will, but she is the greatest actress the modern world has seen, and that's something to have done for your generation. To have moved the feelings and widened the knowledge of thousands by such delicate, such marvellous, such conscientious work as hers—there is an achievement so great, so masterly, that I for one will throw no stones at her!"
'It seemed to me all through as though I were speaking perversely; I could have argued on the other side as passionately as Isabel Bretherton herself; but I was thinking of her dialogue with the Prince, of that feeble, hysterical death-scene, and it irritated me that she, with her beauty, and with British Philistinism and British virtue to back her, should be trampling on Desforêts and genius. But I was conscious of my audacity. If a certain number of critics have been plain-spoken, Isabel Bretherton has none the less been surrounded for months past with people who have impressed upon her that the modern theatre is a very doubtful business, that her acting is as good as anybody's, and that her special mission is to regenerate the manners of the stage. To have the naked, artistic view thrust upon her—that it is the actress's business to act, and that if she does that well, whatever may be her personal short-comings, her generation has cause to be grateful to her—must be repugnant to her. She, too, talks about art, but it is like a child who learns a string of long words without understanding them. She walked on beside me while I cooled down and thought what a fool I had been to endanger a friendship which had opened so well,—her wonderful lips opening once or twice as though to speak, and her quick breath coming and going as she scattered the yellow petals of the flowers far and wide with a sort of mute passion which sent a thrill through me. It was as though she could not trust herself to speak, and I waited awkwardly on Providence, wishing the others were not so far off. But suddenly the tension of her mood seemed to give way. Her smile flashed out, and she turned upon me with a sweet, eager graciousness, quite indescribable.