'While we were sitting in the garden who should be announced but Edward Wallace? I knew, of course, from you that he might be here about this time, but in the hurry of our settling in I had quite forgotten his existence, so that the sight of his trim person bearing down upon us was a surprise. He and the Bretherton party, however, had been going about together for several days, so that he and she had plenty of gossip in common. Miss Bretherton's enthusiasm about Venice is of a very naive, hot, outspoken kind. It seems to me that she is a very susceptible creature. She lives her life fast, and crowds into it a greater number of sensations than most people. All this zest and pleasure must consume a vast amount of nervous force, but it makes her very refreshing to people as blasés as Paul and I are. My first feeling about her is very much what yours was. Personally, there seems to be all the stuff in her of which an actress is made; will she some day stumble upon the discovery of how to bring her own individual flame and force to bear upon her art? I should think it not unlikely, and, altogether, I feel as though I should take a more hopeful view of her intellectually than you do. You see, my dear Eustace, you men never realise how clever we women are, how fast we learn, and how quickly we catch up hints from all quarters under heaven and improve upon them. An actress so young and so sympathetic as Isabel Bretherton must still be very much of an unknown quantity dramatically. I know you think that the want of training is fatal, and that popularity will stereotype her faults. It may be so; but I am inclined to think, from my first sight of her, that she is a nature that will gather from life rather what stimulates it than what dulls and vulgarises it. Altogether, when I compare my first impressions of her with the image of her left by your letters, I feel that I have been pleasantly surprised. Only in the matter of intelligence. Otherwise it has, of course, been your descriptions of her that have planted and nurtured in me that strong sense of attraction which blossomed into liking at the moment of personal contact.'
* * * * *
'August 10.
'This afternoon we have been out in the gondola belonging to this modest establishment, with our magnificent gondolier, Piero, and his boy to convey us to the Lido. I got Miss Bretherton to talk to me about her Jamaica career. She made us all laugh with her accounts of the blood-and-thunder pieces in which the audiences at the Kingston theatre revelled. She seems generally to have played the Bandit's Daughter, the Smuggler's Wife, or the European damsel carried off by Indians, or some other thrilling elemental personage of the kind. The White Lady was, apparently, her first introduction to a more complicated order of play. It is extraordinary, when one comes to think of it, how little positive dramatic knowledge she must have! She knows some Shakespeare, I think—at least, she mentions two or three plays—and I gather from something she. said that she is now making the inevitable study of Juliet that every actress makes sooner or later; but Sheridan, Goldsmith, and, of course, all the French people, are mere names to her. When I think of the minute exhaustive training our Paris actors go through, and compare it with such a state of nature as hers, I am amazed at what she has done! For, after all, you know, she must be able to act to some extent; she must know a great deal more of her business than you and I suspect, or she could not get on at all.'
* * * * *
'August 16.
'It is almost a week, I see, since I wrote to you last. During that time we have seen a great deal more of Miss Bretherton, sometimes in company with her belongings, sometimes without them, and my impressions of her have ripened very fast. Oh, my dear Eustace, you have been hasty,—all the world has been hasty! Isabel Bretherton's real self is only now coming to the front, and it is a self which, as I say to myself with astonishment, not even your keen eyes have ever seen—hardly suspected even. Should I, myself a woman, have been as blind to a woman's capabilities, I wonder? Very likely! These sudden rich developments of youth are often beyond all calculation.
'Mr. Wallace's attitude makes me realise more than I otherwise could the past and present condition of things. He comes and talks to me with amazement of the changes in her tone and outlook, of the girl's sharpening intellect and growing sensitiveness, and as he recalls incidents and traits of the London season—confessions or judgments or blunders of hers, and puts them beside the impression which he sees her to be making on Paul and myself—I begin to understand from his talk and his bewilderment something of the real nature of the case. Intellectually, it has been "the ugly duckling" over again. Under all the crude, unfledged imperfection of her young performance, you people who have watched her with your trained critical eyes seem to me never to have suspected the coming wings, the strange nascent power, which is only now asserting itself in the light of day.
'"What has Eustace been about?" said Paul to me last night, after we had all returned from rambling round and round the moonlit Piazza, and he had been describing to me his talk with her. "He ought to have seen farther ahead. That creature is only just beginning to live—and it will be a life worth having! He has kindled it, too, as much as anybody. Of course we have not seen her act yet, and ignorant—yes, she is certainly ignorant,—though not so much as I imagined. But as for natural power and delicacy of mind, there can be no question at all about them!"
'"I don't know that Eustace did question them," I said; "he thought simply that she had no conception of what her art really required of her, and never would have because of her popularity."