'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 Desforêts, 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. Desforêts," 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 Desforêts 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 to her. She, too, talks about art, but it is like a child who learns a string of long words without understanding them. She walked on beside me while I cooled down and thought what a fool I had been to endanger a friendship which had opened so well,--her wonderful lips opening once or twice as though to speak, and her quick breath coming and going as she scattered the yellow petals of the flowers far and wide with a sort of mute passion which sent a thrill through me. It was as though she could not trust herself to speak, and I waited awkwardly on Providence, wishing the others were not so far off. But suddenly the tension of her mood seemed to give way. Her smile flashed out, and she turned upon me with a sweet, eager graciousness, quite indescribable.