," and it was one of Sarah's bad days. She was
walking through the part listlessly, and I was angry that there should
be any ground for Henry's indifference. The same thing happened years
later, when I took him to see Eleonora Duse. The play was "La
Locandiera," in which to my mind she is not at her very best. He was
surprised at my enthusiasm. There was an element of justice in his
attitude towards the performance which infuriated me, but I doubt if he
would have shown more enthusiasm if he had seen her at her very best.

As the years went on he grew very much attached to Sarah Bernhardt, and
admired her as a colleague whose managerial work in the theater was as
dignified as his own, but of her superb powers as an actress, I don't
believe he ever had a glimmering notion!

Perhaps it is not true, but, as I believe it to be true, I may as well
state it: _It was never any pleasure to him to see the acting of other
actors and actresses._ All the same, Salvini's Othello I know he thought
magnificent, but he would not speak of it.

How dangerous it is to write things that may not be understood! What I
have written I have written merely to indicate the qualities in Henry
Irving's nature, which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have
always been more woman than artist. He always put the theater first. He
lived in it, he died in it. He had none of what I may call my
_bourgeois_ qualities--the love of being in love, the love of a home,
the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my
inferiors. He was sure of his high place. He was far simpler than I in
some ways. He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to
painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But I know now that my
blush was far more unworthy than his freedom from all pretentiousness in
matters of art.

_He never pretended._ One of his biographers has said that he posed as
being a French scholar. Such a thing, and all things like it, were
impossible to his nature. If it were necessary in one of his plays to
say a few French words, he took infinite pains to learn them and said
them beautifully.

Henry once told me that in the early part of his career, before I knew
him, he had been hooted because of his thin legs. The first service I
did him was to tell him they were beautiful, and to make him give up
padding them.

"What do you want with fat, podgy, prize-fighter legs!" I expostulated.

Praise to some people at certain s