Mrs. Bancroft’s wonderful gray eyes, examined it curiously.  The room, the statue, and I myself must all have seemed very strange to her.  I wore a dress of some deep yellow woolen material which my little daughter used to call the “frog dress,” because it was speckled with brown like a frog’s skin.  It was cut like a Viollet-le-Duc tabard, and had not a trace of the fashion of the time.  Mrs. Bancroft, however, did not look at me less kindly because I wore aesthetic clothes and was painfully thin.  She explained that they were going to put on “The Merchant of Venice” at the Prince of Wales’s, that she was to rest for a while for reasons connected with her health; that she and Mr. Bancroft had thought of me for Portia.

Portia!  It seemed too good to be true!  I was a student when I was young.  I knew not only every word of the part, but every detail of that period of Venetian splendor in which the action of the play takes place.  I had studied Vecellio.  Now I am old, it is impossible for me to work like that, but I never acknowledge that I get on as well without it.

Mrs. Bancroft told me that the production would be as beautiful as money and thought could make it.  The artistic side of the venture was to be in the hands of Mr. Godwin, who had designed my dress for Titania at Bristol.

“Well, what do you say?” said Mrs. Bancroft.  “Will you put your shoulder to the wheel with us?”

I answered incoherently and joyfully, that of all things I had been wanting most to play in Shakespeare; that in Shakespeare I had always felt I would play for half the salary; that—­oh, I don’t know what I said!  Probably it was all very foolish and unbusinesslike, but the engagement was practically settled before Mrs. Bancroft left the house, although I was charged not to say anything about it yet.

But theater secrets are generally secrets de polichinelle.  When I went to Charles Reade’s house at Albert Gate on the following Sunday for one of his regular Sunday parties, he came up to me at once with a knowing look and said: 

“So you’ve got an engagement.”

“I’m not to say anything about it.”

“It’s in Shakespeare!”

“I’m not to tell.”

“But I know.  I’ve been thinking it out.  It’s ‘The Merchant of Venice.’”

“Nothing is settled yet.  It’s on the cards.”

“I know!  I know!” said wise old Charles.  “Well, you’ll never have such a good part as Philippa Chester!”

“No, Nelly, never!” said Mrs. Seymour, who happened to overhear this.  “They call Philippa a Rosalind part.  Rosalind!  Rosalind is not to be compared with it!”

Between Mrs. Seymour and Charles Reade existed a friendship of that rare sort about which it is easy for people who are not at all rare, unfortunately, to say ill-natured things.  Charles Reade worshiped Laura Seymour, and she understood him and sympathized with his work and his whims.  She died before he did, and he never got over it.  The great success of one of his last plays, “Drink,” an adaptation from the French, in which Charles Warner is still thrilling audiences to this day, meant nothing to him because she was not alive to share it.  The “In Memoriam” which he had inscribed over her grave is characteristic of the man, the woman, and their friendship: