ir to listen. The unsuccessful playwright read
to her a scene or two from his still unfinished drama. She heard him
patiently, noting the cultivated accent of his voice, which proved to
her that he was at least a gentleman. When he had finished, she said:

"Yes, that's good! The plot is excellent." Then she laughed a sort of
stage laugh, and remarked lightly: "Why don't you turn it into a novel?"

Reade was stung to the quick. Nothing that she could have said would
have hurt him more. Novels he despised; and here was this woman, the
queen of the English stage, as he regarded her, laughing at his drama
and telling him to make a novel of it. He rose and bowed.

"I am trespassing on your time," he said; and, after barely touching
the fingers of her outstretched hand, he left the room abruptly.

The woman knew men very well, though she scarcely knew Charles Reade.
Something in his melancholy and something in his manner stirred her
heart. It was not a heart that responded to emotions readily, but it
was a very good-natured heart. Her explanation of Reade's appearance
led her to think that he was very poor. If she had not much tact, she
had an abundant store of sympathy; and so she sat down and wrote a very
blundering but kindly letter, in which she enclosed a five-pound note.

Reade subsequently described his feelings on receiving this letter with
its bank-note. He said:

"I, who had been vice-president of Magdalen--I, who flattered myself I
was coming to the fore as a dramatist--to have a five-pound note flung
at my head, like a ticket for soup to a pauper, or a bone to a dog, and
by an actress, too! Yet she said my reading was admirable; and, after
all, there is much virtue in a five-pound note. Anyhow, it showed the
writer had a good heart."

The more he thought of her and of the incident, the more comforted he
was. He called on her the next day without making an appointment; and
when she received him, he had the five-pound note fluttering in his
hand.

She started to speak, but he interrupted her.

"No," he said, "that is not what I wanted from you. I wanted sympathy,
and you have unintentionally supplied it."

Then this man, whom she had regarded as half starved, presented her
with an enormous bunch of hothouse grapes, and the two sat down and ate
them together, thus beginning a friendship which ended only with Laura
Seymour's death.

Oddly enough, Mrs. Seymour's suggestion that Reade should make a story
of