I even muttered them to myself that the people about might hear.
I had discovered for the first time that in the performance of all drama
that depends for its effect upon beauty of language, poetical culture may
be more important than professional experience.

Florence Farr lived in lodgings some twenty minutes' walk away at Brook
Green, and I was soon a constant caller, talking over plays that I would
some day write her. She had three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that
of Demeter's image near the British Museum reading room door, and an
incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural
expression of the image. And yet there was scarce another gift that she
did not value above those three. We all have our simplifying image, our
genius, and such hard burden does it lay upon us that, but for the praise
of others, we would deride it and hunt it away. She could only express
hers through an unfashionable art, an art that has scarce existed since
the seventeenth century, and so could only earn unimportant occasional
praise. She would dress without care or calculation as if to hide her
beauty and seem contemptuous of its power. If a man fell in love with her
she would notice that she had seen just that movement upon the stage or
had heard just that intonation and all seemed unreal. If she read out some
poem in English or in French all was passion, all a traditional splendour,
but she spoke of actual things with a cold wit or under the strain of
paradox. Wit and paradox alike sought to pull down whatever had tradition
or passion and she was soon to spend her days in the British Museum
reading room and become erudite in many heterogeneous studies moved by an
insatiable, destroying curiosity. I formed with her an enduring friendship
that was an enduring exasperation--"why do you play the part with a bent
back and a squeak in the voice? How can you be a character actor, you who
hate all our life, you who belong to a life that is a vision?" But
argument was no use, and some Nurse in Euripedes must be played with all
an old woman's infirmities and not as I would have it, with all a Sybil's
majesty, because "it is no use doing what nobody wants," or because she
would show that she "could do what the others did."

I used in my rage to compare her thoughts, when her worst mood was upon
her, to a game called Spillikens which I had seen played in my childhood
with little pieces of bone that you had to draw out