if I can, that a woman may
be an actress and still be a lady, still be treated just as you treat the
women you know and respect! I mean to prove that there need never be a
word breathed against her, that she is anybody's equal, and that her
private life is her own, and not the public's! It makes my blood boil to
hear the way people--especially men--talk about Madame Desforets; there
is not one of you who would let your wife or your sister shake hands with
her, and yet how you rave about her, how you talk as if there were
nothing in the world but genius--and French genius!"

'It struck me that I had got to something very much below the surface in
Miss Bretherton. It was a curious outburst; I remembered how often her
critics had compared her to Desforets, greatly to her disadvantage. Was
this championship of virtue quite genuine? or was it merely the best
means of defending herself against a rival by the help of British
respectability?

'"Mme. Desforets," I said, perhaps a little drily, "is a riddle to her
best friends, and probably to herself; she does a thousand wild,
imprudent, _bad_ things if you will, but she is the greatest actress the
modern world has seen, and that's something to have done for your
generation. To have moved the feelings and widened the knowledge of
thousands by such delicate, such marvellous, such conscientious work as
hers--there is an achievement so great, so masterly, that I for one will
throw no stones at her!"

'It seemed to me all through as though I were speaking perversely; I
could have argued on the other side as passionately as Isabel Bretherton
herself; but I was thinking of her dialogue with the Prince, of that
feeble, hysterical death-scene, and it irritated me that she, with her
beauty, and with British Philistinism and British virtue to back her,
should be trampling on Desforets and genius. But I was conscious of my
audacity. If a certain number of critics have been plain-spoken, Isabel
Bretherton has none the less been surrounded for months past with people
who have impressed upon her that the modern theatre is a very doubtful
business, that her acting is as good as anybody's, and that her special
mission is to regenerate the manners of the stage. To have the naked,
artistic view thrust upon her--that it is the actress's business to
_act_, and that if she does that well, whatever may be her personal
short-comings, her generation has cause to be grateful to her--must be
repugnant