fainting figure of her rival while she uttered her wailing
traditional prophecy of woe, her whole personality seemed to be invested
with a dramatic force of which there had been no trace in the long and
violent scene with the Prince. It was as though she was in some sort
capable of expressing herself in action and movement, while in all the
arts of speech she was a mere crude novice. At any rate, there could be
no doubt that in this one scene she realised the utmost limits of the
author's ideal, and when she faded into the darkness beyond the moonlight
in which she had first appeared, the house, which had been breathlessly
silent during the progress of the apparition, burst into a roar of
applause, in which Wallace and Kendal heartily joined.

'Exquisite!' said Kendal in Mrs. Stuart's ear, as he stood behind her
chair. 'She was romance itself! Her acting should always be a kind of
glorified and poetical pantomime; she would be inimitable so.'

Mrs. Stuart looked up and smiled agreement. 'Yes, that scene lives with
one. If everything else in the play is poor, she is worth seeing for that
alone. _Remember it_!'

The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too
many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made. In the
great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has
to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of
the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a
force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the
Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition. In the two or three
fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress
showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same
powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker
and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term
'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of
long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald,
plain fact--the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her
lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was
evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all
technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air,
which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had
been of the poorest type. And in all othe