ntic took my place as hostess (I was at the theater as usual); and I
took great pains to have everything looking nice! I spent a long time
putting out my best blue china, and ordered a splendid dinner, quite
forgetting the honored guest generally dined off a Plasmon biscuit and a
bean!

Mr. Shaw read "Arms and the Man" to my young American friend (Miss Satty
Fairchild) without even going into the dining-room where the blue china
was spread out to delight his eye. My daughter Edy was present at the
reading, and appeared so much absorbed in some embroidery, and paid the
reader so few compliments about his play, that he expressed the opinion
that she behaved as if she had been married to him for twenty years!

The first time I ever saw Mr. Shaw in the flesh--I hope he will pardon
me such an anti-vegetarian expression--was when he took his call after
the first production of "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" by the Stage
Society. He was quite unlike what I had imagined from his letters.

When at last I was able to play in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," I
found Bernard Shaw wonderfully patient at rehearsal. I look upon him as
a good, kind, gentle creature whose "brain-storms" are just due to the
Irishman's love of a fight; they never spring from malice or anger. It
doesn't answer to take Bernard Shaw seriously. He is not a man of
convictions. That is one of the charms of his plays--to me at least. One
never knows how the cat is really jumping. But it _jumps_. Bernard Shaw
is alive, with nine lives, like that cat!

On Whit Monday, 1902, I received a telegram from Mr. Tree saying that he
was coming down to Winchelsea to see me on "an important matter of
business." I was at the time suffering from considerable depression
about the future.

The Stratford-on-Avon visit had inspired me with the feeling that there
was life in the old 'un yet and had distracted my mind from the
strangeness of no longer being at the Lyceum permanently with Henry
Irving. But there seemed to be nothing ahead, except two matinees a
week with him at the Lyceum, to be followed by a provincial tour in
which I was only to play twice a week, as Henry's chief attraction was
to be "Faust." This sort of "dowager" engagement did not tempt me.
Besides, I hated the idea of drawing a large salary and doing next to no
work.

So when Mr. Tree proposed that I should play Mrs. Page (Mrs. Kendal
being Mrs. Ford) in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" at His Majesty's,