HERE LIES THE GREAT HEART OF
    LAURA SEYMOUR

I liked Mrs. Seymour so much that I was hurt when I found that she had instructed Charles Reade to tell Nelly Terry “not to paint her face” in the daytime, and I was young enough to enjoy revenging myself in my own way.  We used to play childish games at Charles Reade’s house sometimes, and with “Follow my leader” came my opportunity.  I asked for a basin of water and a towel and scrubbed my face with a significant thoroughness.  The rules of the game meant that everyone had to follow my example!  When I had dried my face I powdered it, and then darkened my eyebrows.  I wished to be quite frank about the harmless little bit of artifice which Mrs. Seymour had exaggerated into a crime.  She was now hoist with her own petard, for, being heavily made up, she could not and would not follow the leader.  After this Charles Reade acquitted me of the use of “pigments red,” but he still kept up a campaign against “Chalky,” as he humorously christened my powder-puff.  “Don’t be pig-headed, love,” he wrote to me once; “it is because Chalky does not improve you that I forbid it.  Trust unprejudiced and friendly eyes and drop it altogether.”

Although Mrs. Seymour was naturally prejudiced where Charles Reade’s work was concerned, she only spoke the truth, pardonably exaggerated, about the part of Philippa Chester.  I know no part which is a patch on it for effectiveness; yet there is little in it of the stuff which endures.  The play itself was too unbusiness like ever to become a classic.

Not for years afterwards did I find out that I was not the “first choice” for Portia.  The Bancrofts had tried the Kendals first, with the idea of making a double engagement; but the negotiations failed.  Perhaps the rivalry between Mrs. Kendal and me might have become of more significance had she appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales’s and preferred Shakespeare to domestic comedy.  In after years she played Rosalind—­I never did, alas!—­and quite recently acted with me in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”; but the best of her fame will always be associated with such plays as “The Squire,” “The Ironmaster,” “Lady Clancarty,” and many more plays of that type.  When she played with me in Shakespeare she laughingly challenged me to come and play with her in a modern piece, a domestic play, and I said, “Done!” but it has not been done yet, although in Mrs. Clifford’s “The Likeness of the Night” there was a good medium for the experiment.  I found Mrs. Kendal wonderful to act with.  No other English actress has such extraordinary skill.  Of course, people have said we are jealous of each other.  “Ellen Terry Acts with Lifelong Enemy,” proclaimed an American newspaper in five-inch type, when we played together as Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in Mr. Tree’s Coronation production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”  But the enmity did not seem to worry us as much as the newspaper men over the Atlantic had represented.