I told her not to be a goose, but to cheer up and come and stay with me until something turned up.  We packed the old nurse back to Devonshire.  Violet came and stayed with me, and in due course something did turn up.  Mr. Toole came to dinner, and Violet, acting on my instructions to ask every one she saw for an engagement, asked Mr. Toole!  He said, “That’s all right, my dear.  Of course.  Come down and see me to-morrow.”  Dear old Toole!  The kindliest of men!  Violet was with him for some time, and played at his theater in Mr. Barrie’s first piece “Walker London.”  Her sister Irene, Seymour Hicks, and Mary Ansell (now Mrs. Barrie) were all in the cast.

This was all I did to “help” Violet Vanbrugh, now Mrs. Arthur Bourchier and one of our best actresses, in her stage career.  She helped herself, as most people do who get on.  I am afraid that I have discouraged more stage aspirants than I have encouraged.  Perhaps I have snubbed really talented people, so great is my horror of girls taking to the stage as a profession when they don’t realize what they are about.  I once told an elderly aspirant that it was quite useless for any one to go on the stage who had not either great beauty or great talent.  She wrote saying that my letter had been a great relief to her, as now she was not discouraged.  “I have both.”

There is one actress on the English stage whom I did definitely encourage, of whose talent I was certain.

When my daughter was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Dr. (now Sir Alexander) Mackenzie asked me to distribute the medals to the Elocution Class at the end of the term.  I was quite “new to the job,” and didn’t understand the procedure.  No girl, I have learned since, can be given the gold medal until she has won both the bronze and the silver medals—­that is, until she has been at the Academy three years.  I was for giving the gold medalists, who only wanted certificates, bronze medals; and of one young girl who was in her first year and only entitled to a bronze medal, I said:  “Oh, she must have the gold medal, of course!”

She was a queer-looking child, handsome, with a face suggesting all manner of possibilities.  When she stood up to read the speech from “Richard II.” she was nervous, but courageously stood her ground.  She began slowly, and with a most “fetching” voice, to think out the words.  You saw her think them, heard her speak them.  It was so different from the intelligent elocution, the good recitation, but bad impersonation of the others!  “A pathetic face, a passionate voice, a brain,” I thought to myself.  It must have been at this point that the girl flung away the book and began to act, in an undisciplined way, of course, but with such true emotion, such intensity, that the tears came to my eyes.  The tears came to her eyes too.  We both wept, and then we embraced, and then we wept again.  It was an easy victory for her.  She was incomparably better than any one.  “She has to work,” I wrote in my diary that day.  “Her life must be given to it, and then she will—­well, she will achieve just as high as she works.”  Lena Pocock was the girl’s name, but she changed it to Lena Ashwell when she went on the stage.