son, which began early in September; he had appropriate
costumes for all of them, and no one dressed the part more perfectly in
tennis or golf or sailing or fishing. He believed that he ought to read
up in the summer, too, and he had the very best of the recent books, in
fiction and criticism, and the new drama. He had all of the translations
of Ibsen, and several of Maeterlinck's plays in French; he read a good
deal in his books, and he lent them about in the hotel even more. Among
the ladies there he had the repute of a very modern intellect, and of a
person you would never take for an actor, from his tastes. What his
tastes would have been if you had taken him for an actor, they could not
have said, perhaps, but probably something vicious, and he had not a
vice. He did not smoke, and he did not so much as drink tea or coffee;
he had cocoa for breakfast, and at lunch a glass of milk, with water at
dinner. He had a tint like the rose, and when he smiled or laughed,
which was often, from a constitutional amiability and a perfect
digestion, his teeth showed white and regular, and an innocent dimple
punctured either cheek. His name was Godolphin, for he had instinctively
felt that in choosing a name he might as well take a handsome one while
he was about it, and that if he became Godolphin there was no reason why
he should not become Launcelot, too. He did not put on these splendors
from any foible, but from a professional sense of their value in the
bills; and he was not personally characterized by them. As Launcelot
Godolphin he was simpler than he would have been with a simpler name,
and it was his ideal to be modest in everything that personally belonged
to him. He studied an unprofessional walk, and a very colloquial tone
in speaking. He was of course clean-shaven, but during the summer he let
his mustache grow, though he was aware that he looked better without it.
He was tall, and he carried himself with the vigor of his perfect
health; but on the stage he looked less than his real size, like a
perfectly proportioned edifice.

Godolphin wanted the Maxwells to come to his hotel in Manchester, but
there were several reasons for their not doing this; the one Maxwell
alleged was that they could not afford it. They had settled for the
summer, when they got home after their brief wedding journey, at a much
cheaper house in Magnolia, and the actor and the author were then only
three miles apart, which Mrs. Maxwell thought w