“My nights have been sleepless—­my drawing sitting gibbering on my chest.  I knew how fearfully I should stumble—­that is why I wanted to do more drawings earlier.  I have been working on the thing this morning, and I believe I improved it slightly.  What I want now is a cloak—­the simplest you have (perhaps the green one?), which I think would be better than the less simple and worrying lace fallalas in the drawing.  I can put it on the lay figure and sketch it into the horror over the old lines.  I think the darker stuff will make the face blonde—­more delicate.  Please understand how nervously excited I have been over the wretched drawing, how short it falls of any suggestion of that personality of which I cannot speak to you—­which I should some day like to give a shadow of....

“You were altogether charming and delightful and sympathetic.  Perhaps if you had looked like a bear and behaved like a harpy, who knows what I might not have done!

“...  You shall have a sight of a proof at the end of the week, if you have any address out of town.  Meanwhile I will do my best to improve the stone.

“Always yours, dear Miss Terry,

“WILL ROTHENSTEIN.”

My dear friend Graham Robertson painted two portraits of me, and I was Mortimer Menpes’ first subject in England.

Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema did the designs for the scenery and dresses in “Cymbeline,” and incidentally designed for Imogen one of the loveliest dresses that I ever wore.  It was made by Mrs. Nettleship.  So were the dresses that Burne-Jones designed for me to wear in “King Arthur.”

Many of my most effective dresses have been what I may call “freaks.”  The splendid dress that I wore in the Trial Scene in “Henry VIII.” is one example of what I mean.  Mr. Seymour Lucas designed it, and there was great difficulty in finding a material rich enough and somber enough at the same time.  No one was so clever on such quests as Mrs. Comyns Carr.  She was never to be misled by the appearance of the stuff in the hand, nor impressed by its price by the yard, if she did not think it would look right on the stage.  As Katherine she wanted me to wear steely silver and bronzy gold, but all the brocades had such insignificant designs.  If they had a silver design on them it looked under the lights like a scratch in white cotton!  At last Mrs. Carr found a black satin which on the right side was timorously and feebly patterned with a meandering rose and thistle.  On the wrong side of it was a sheet of silver—­just the right steely silver because it was the wrong side!  Mrs. Carr then started on another quest for gold that should be as right as that silver.  She found it at last in some gold-lace antimacassars at Whiteley’s!  From these base materials she and Mrs. Nettleship constructed a magnificent queenly dress.  Its only fault was that it was heavy.