likely to feel annoyance towards her again. She is like some frank,
beautiful, high-spirited child playing a game she only half understands.
I wish she understood it better. I should like to help her to understand
it--but I won't quarrel with her, even in my thoughts, any more!

* * * * *

'On looking over this letter it seems to me that if
you were not you, and I were not I, you might with
some plausibility accuse me of being--what?--in love
with Miss Bretherton? But you know me too well.
You know I am one of the old-fashioned people who
believe in community of interests--in belonging to the
same world. When I come coolly to think about it, I
can hardly imagine two worlds, whether outwardly or
inwardly, more wide apart than mine and Miss
Bretherton's.'

CHAPTER V

During the three weeks which elapsed between the two expeditions of the
'Sunday League,' Kendal saw Miss Bretherton two or three times under
varying circumstances. One night he took it into his head to go to the
pit of the _Calliope_, and came away more persuaded than before that as
an actress there was small prospect for her. Had she been an ordinary
mortal, he thought the original stuff in her might have been disciplined
into something really valuable by the common give and take, the normal
rubs and difficulties of her profession. But, as it was, she had been
lifted at once by the force of one natural endowment into a position
which, from the artistic point of view, seemed to him hopeless. Her
instantaneous success--dependent as it was on considerations wholly
outside those of dramatic art--had denied her all the advantages which
are to be won from struggle and from laborious and gradual conquest. And
more than this, it had deprived her of an ideal; it had tended to make
her take her own performance as the measure of the good and possible.
For, naturally, it was too much to expect that she herself should analyse
truly the sources and reasons of her popularity. She must inevitably
believe that some, at least, of it was due to her dramatic talent in
itself. 'Perhaps some of it is,' Kendal would answer himself. 'It is very
possible that I am not quite fair to her. She has all the faults which
repel me most. I could get over anything but this impression of bare
blank ignorance which she makes upon me. And as things are at present, it
is impossible that she should learn. It might be interesting to have the
teaching o