re,
and who hold by the 'fiend' reading of the character.... One of the
best things ever written on the subject, I think, is the essay of
J. Comyns Carr. That is as hotly discussed as the new 'Lady
Mac'--all the best people agreeing with it. Oh, dear! It is an
exciting time!"

From a letter I wrote to my daughter, who was in Germany at the time:

"I wish you could see my dresses. They are superb, especially the
first one: green beetles on it, and such a cloak! The photographs
give no idea of it at all, for it is in color that it is so
splendid. The dark red hair is fine. The whole thing is
Rossetti--rich stained-glass effects, I play some of it well, but,
of course, I don't do what I want to do yet. Meanwhile I shall not
budge an inch in the reading of it, for that I know is right. Oh,
it's fun, but it's precious hard work for I by no means make her a
'gentle, lovable woman' as some of 'em say. That's all pickles. She
was nothing of the sort, although she was _not_ a fiend, and _did_
love her husband. I have to what is vulgarly called 'sweat at it,'
each night."

The few people who liked my Lady Macbeth, liked it very much. I hope I
am not vain to quote this letter from Lady Pollock:

"... Burne-Jones has been with me this afternoon: he was at
'Macbeth' last night, and you filled his whole soul with your
beauty and your poetry.... He says you were a great Scandinavian
queen; that your presence, your voice, your movement made a
marvelously poetic harmony; that your dress was grandly imagined
and grandly worn--and that he cannot criticize--he can only
remember."

But Burne-Jones by this time had become one of our most ardent admirers,
and was prejudiced in my favor because my acting appealed to his _eye_.
Still, the drama is for the eye as well as for the ear and the mind.

Very early I learned that one had best be ambitious merely to please
oneself in one's work a little--quietly. I coupled with this the
reflection that one "gets nothing for nothing, and damned little for
sixpence!"

Here I was in the very noonday of life, fresh from Lady Macbeth and
still young enough to play Rosalind, suddenly called upon to play a
rather uninteresting mother in "The Dead Heart." However, my son Teddy
made his first appearance in it, and had such a big success that I soon
forgot that for me the play was rathe