'"Mr. Kendal," she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers to her, "you may have misunderstood something just now. I don't want to pretend to what I haven't got. I don't know French, and I can't read French novels if I wished to ever so much."
'What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly, having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself. I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenly I thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.
'"Well," I said deliberately, walking on beside her; "you lose a good deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you full into the mid-European stream--you feel it flowing, you are brought into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth, he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such force of representation! It's the same with their novels as with their theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the world. They don't shirk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether it's acting, or painting, or writing. You've never seen Desforêts, I think?--no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again. What a pity!"
'Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. "I am not sorry," she said. "Nothing would have induced me to go and see her."
'"Indeed!" I said, waiting a little curiously for what she would say next.
'"It's not that I am jealous of her," she exclaimed, with a quick proud look at me; "not that I don't believe she's a great actress; but I can't separate her acting from what she is herself. It is women like that who bring discredit on the whole profession--it is women like that who make people think that no good woman can be an actress. I resent it, and I mean to take the other line. I want to prove, if I can, that a woman may be an actress and still be a lady, still be treated just as you treat the women you know and respect! I mean to prove that there need never be a word breathed against her, that she is anybody's equal, and that her private life is her own, and not the public's! It makes my blood boil to hear the way people--especially men--talk about Madame Desforêts; there is not one of you who would let your wife or your sister shake hands with her, and yet how you rave about her, how you talk as if there were nothing in the world but genius--and French genius!"