the girls, but it was a good thing it ended
in smoke. With all his charm, Wills was not cut out for a husband. He
was Irish all over--the strangest mixture of the aristocrat and the
sloven. He could eat a large raw onion every night like any peasant, yet
his ideas were magnificent and instinct with refinement.

A true Bohemian in money matters, he made a great deal out of his
plays--and never had a farthing to bless himself with!

In the theater he was charming--from an actor's point of view. He
interfered very little with the stage management, and did not care to
sit in the stalls and criticise. But he would come quietly to me and
tell me things which were most illuminating, and he paid me the
compliment of weeping at the wing while I rehearsed "Olivia."

_I_ was generally weeping, too, for Olivia, more than any part, touched
me to the heart. I cried too much in it, just as I cried too much later
on in the Nunnery scene in "Hamlet," and in the last act of "Charles I."
My real tears on the stage have astonished some people, and have been
the envy of others, but they have often been a hindrance to me. I have
had to _work_ to restrain them.

Oddly enough, although "Olivia" was such a great success at the Court,
it has never made much money since. The play could pack a tiny theater;
it could never appeal in a big way to the masses. In itself it had a
sure message--the love story of an injured woman is one of the cards in
the stage pack which it is always safe to play--but against this there
was a bad last act, one of the worst I have ever acted in. It was always
being tinkered with, but patching and alteration only seems to weaken
it.

Mr. Hare produced "Olivia" perfectly. Marcus Stone designed the clothes,
and I found my dresses--both faithful and charming as reproductions of
the eighteenth century spirit--stood the advance of time and the
progress of ideas when I played the part later at the Lyceum. I had not
to alter anything. Henry Irving discovered the same thing about the
scenery and stage management. They could not be improved upon. There was
very little scenery at the Court, but a great deal of taste and care in
selection.

Every one was "Olivia" mad. The Olivia cap shared public favor with the
Langtry bonnet. That most lovely and exquisite creature, Mrs. Langtry,
could not go out anywhere, at the dawn of the 'eighties, without a crowd
collecting to look at her! It was no rare thing to see the crowd, to ask