I
should think it not unlikely, and, altogether, I feel as though I should
take a more hopeful view of her intellectually than you do. You see, my
dear Eustace, you men never realise how clever we women are, how fast we
learn, and how quickly we catch up hints from all quarters under heaven
and improve upon them. An actress so young and so sympathetic as Isabel
Bretherton must still be very much of an unknown quantity dramatically. I
know you think that the want of training is fatal, and that popularity
will stereotype her faults. It may be so; but I am inclined to think,
from my first sight of her, that she is a nature that will gather from
life rather what stimulates it than what dulls and vulgarises it.
Altogether, when I compare my first impressions of her with the image of
her left by your letters, I feel that I have been pleasantly surprised.
Only in the matter of intelligence. Otherwise it has, of course, been
your descriptions of her that have planted and nurtured in me that strong
sense of attraction which blossomed into liking at the moment of personal
contact.'

* * * * *

'_August_ 10.

'This afternoon we have been out in the gondola belonging to this
modest establishment, with our magnificent gondolier, Piero, and his
boy to convey us to the Lido. I got Miss Bretherton to talk to me about
her Jamaica career. She made us all laugh with her accounts of the
blood-and-thunder pieces in which the audiences at the Kingston theatre
revelled. She seems generally to have played the Bandit's Daughter, the
Smuggler's Wife, or the European damsel carried off by Indians, or some
other thrilling elemental personage of the kind. The _White Lady_ was,
apparently, her first introduction to a more complicated order of play.
It is extraordinary, when one comes to think of it, how little positive
dramatic knowledge she must have! She knows some Shakespeare, I think--at
least, she mentions two or three plays--and I gather from something she.
said that she is now making the inevitable study of Juliet that every
actress makes sooner or later; but Sheridan, Goldsmith, and, of course,
all the French people, are mere names to her. When I think of the minute
exhaustive training our Paris actors go through, and compare it with such
a state of nature as hers, I am amazed at what she has done! For, after
all, you know, she must be able to act to some extent; she must know a
great deal more of her busines