ary splendor. "She can't
be all of her parts--which one of them will I find as I enter her room?"
he asked himself for the hundredth time.

"Miss Merival will see Mr. Douglass," said the bell-boy. "This way,
sir."

As he stepped into the elevator the young man's face grew stern and his
lips straightened out into a grim line. It was absurd to think he should
be so deeply moved by any woman alive, he who prided himself on his
self-possession.

Down a long hall on the tenth floor the boy led him, and tapped at a
door, which was opened after a pause by a quiet woman who greeted him
with outstretched hand, kindly cordial.

"How do you do, Mr. Douglass? It is very good of you to come," she said,
with the simplest inflection.

"This must be an elder sister," he thought, and followed her into a
large sitting-room, where a gray-haired woman and a young man were
sipping after-dinner coffee.

"Mother, this is Mr. Douglass, the author of _The Modern Stage_, the
little book of essays we liked so well." The elderly lady greeted him
cordially, but with a timid air. "And this is my brother Hugh," the
young man gave Douglass's hand a firm and cordial grip.

"Sit down, please--not there--over here, where the light will fall on
you. I want to see how you look," she added, in smiling candor; and with
that smile he recognized in his hostess the great actress.

He was fairly dazed, and for the moment entirely wordless. From the very
moment the door had opened to him the "glittering woman" had been
receding into remote and ever remoter distances, for the Helen Merival
before him was as simple, candid, and cordial as his own sister. Her
voice had the home inflection; she displayed neither paint nor powder;
her hair was plainly brushed--beautiful hair it was, too--and her dress
was lovely and in quiet taste.

Her face seemed plain at first, just as her stature seemed small. She
was dark, but not so dark as she appeared on the stage, and her face was
thinner, a little careworn, it seemed to him; and her eyes--"those
leering, wicked eyes"--were large and deep and soft. Her figure was
firm, compact, womanly, and modest in every line. No wife could have
seemed more of the home than this famous actress who faced him with
hands folded in her lap.

He was stupefied. Suddenly he perceived the injustice and the crass
folly of his estimate of her character, and with this perception came a
broader and deeper realization of her greatness as an