'"It wants more work," said Paul; "you'll get it. But the rest was admirable. You must have worked very hard!"
'"So I have," she said, brightening at the warmth of his praise. "But Diderot is wrong, wrong, wrong! When I could once reach the feeling of the Tybalt speech, when I could once hate him for killing Tybalt in the same breath in which I loved him for being Romeo, all was easy; gesture and movement came to me; I learnt them, and the thing was done."
'The reference, of course, meant that Paul had been reading to her his favourite Paradoxe sur le Comédien, and that she had been stimulated, but not converted, by the famous contention that the actor should be the mere "cold and tranquil spectator," the imitator of other men's feelings, while possessing none of his own. He naturally would have argued, but I would not have it, and made her rest. She was quite worn out with the effort, and I do not like this excessive fatigue of hers. I often wonder whether the life she is leading is not too exciting for her. This is supposed to be her holiday, and she is really going through more brain-waste than she has ever done in her life before! Paul is throwing his whole energies into one thing only, the training of Miss Bretherton; and he is a man of forty-eight, with an immense experience, and she a girl of twenty-one, with everything to learn, and as easily excited as he is capable of exciting her. I really must keep him in check.
'Mr. Wallace, when we had sent her home across the canal—their apartment is on the other side, farther up towards the railway station—could not say enough to me of his amazement at the change in her.
'"What have you done to her?" he asked. "I can hardly recognise the old Miss Bretherton at all. Is it really not yet four months since your brother and I went to see her in the White Lady? Why, you have bewitched her!"
'"We have done something, I admit," I said; "but the power you see developed in her now was roused in her when months ago she first came in contact with the new world and the new ideal which you and Eustace represented to her."
'There, my dear Eustace, have I given you your due? Oh, Miss Bretherton says so many kind things about you! I'll take especial pains to tell you some of them next time I write.'
* * * * *
WALLACE TO KENDAL.
'VENICE, August 27.