At rehearsals there was one girl who did this movement with peculiar grace.  She wore a black velveteen dress, although it was very hot weather, and I called her “Hamlet.”  I used to chaff her about wearing such a grand dress at rehearsals, but she was never to be seen in any other.  The girls at the theater told me that she was very poor, and that underneath her black velveteen dress, which she wore summer and winter, she had nothing but a pair of stockings and a chemise.  Not long after the first night of “The Cup” she disappeared.  I made inquiries about her, and found that she was dying in hospital.  I went several times to see her.  She looked so beautiful in the little white bed.  Her great eyes, black, with weary white lids, used to follow me as I left the hospital ward, and I could not always tear myself away from their dumb beseechingness, but would turn back and sit down again by the bed.  Once she asked me if I would leave something belonging to me that she might look at until I came again.  I took off the amber and coral beads that I was wearing at the time and gave them to her.  Two days later I had a letter from the nurse telling me that poor Hamlet was dead—­that just before she died, with closed eyes, and gasping for breath, she sent her love to her “dear Miss Terry,” and wanted me to know that the tall lilies I had brought her on my last visit were to be buried with her, but that she had wiped the coral and amber beads and put them in cotton-wool, to be returned to me when she was dead.  Poor “Hamlet”!

Quite as wonderful as the Temple Scene was the setting of the first act, which represented the rocky side of a mountain with a glimpse of a fertile table-land and a pergola with vines growing over it at the top.  The acting in this scene all took place on different levels.  The hunt swept past on one level; the entrance to the temple was on another.  A goatherd played upon a pipe.  Scenically speaking, it was not Greece, but Greece in Sicily, Capri, or some such hilly region.

Henry Irving was not able to look like the full-lipped, full-blooded Romans such as we see in long lines in marble at the British Museum, so he conceived his own type of the blend of Roman intellect and sensuality with barbarian cruelty and lust.  Tennyson was not pleased with him as Synorix! How he failed to delight in it as a picture I can’t conceive.  With a pale, pale face, bright red hair, gold armor and a tiger-skin, a diabolical expression and very thin crimson lips, Henry looked handsome and sickening at the same time. Lechery was written across his forehead.

The first act was well within my means; the second was beyond them, but it was very good for me to try and do it.  I had a long apostrophe to the goddess with my back turned to the audience, and I never tackled anything more difficult.  My dresses, designed by Mr. Godwin, one of them with the toga made of that wonderful material which Arnott had printed, were simple, fine and free.