and there seemed no reason why the triumph
of Robertson should not go on for ever.

But that's the strange thing about theatrical success. However great, it
is limited in its force and duration, as we found out at the Lyceum
twenty years later. It was not only because the Bancrofts were ambitious
that they determined on a Shakespearean revival in 1875: they felt that
you can give the public too much even of a good thing, and thought that
a complete change might bring their theater new popularity as well as
new honor.

I, however, thought little of this at the time. After my return to the
stage in "The Wandering Heir" and my tour with Charles Reade, my
interest in the theater again declined. It has always been my fate or my
nature--perhaps they are really the same thing--to be very happy or
very miserable. At this time I was very miserable. I was worried to
death by domestic troubles and financial difficulties. The house in
which I first lived in London, after I left Hertfordshire, had been
dismantled of some of its most beautiful treasures by the brokers.
Pressure was being put on me by well-meaning friends to leave this house
and make a great change in my life. Everything was at its darkest when
Mrs. Bancroft came to call on me and offered me the part of Portia in
"The Merchant of Venice."

I had, of course, known her before, in the way that all people in the
theater seem to know each other, and I had seen her act; but on this
day, when she came to me as a kind of messenger of Fate, the harbinger
of the true dawn of my success, she should have had for me some special
and extraordinary significance. I could invest that interview now with
many dramatic features, but my memory, either because it is bad or
because it is good, corrects my imagination.

"May I come in?"

An ordinary remark, truly, to stick in one's head for thirty-odd years!
But it was made in such a _very_ pretty voice--one of the most silvery
voices I have ever heard from any woman except the late Queen Victoria,
whose voice was like a silver stream flowing over golden stones.

The smart little figure--Mrs. Bancroft was, above all things,
_petite_--dressed in black--elegant Parisian black--came into a room
which had been almost completely stripped of furniture. The floor was
covered with Japanese matting, and at one end was a cast of the Venus
of Milo, almost the same colossal size as the original.

Mrs. Bancroft's wonderful gray eyes, examined it