“Don’t do that,” I said.  “Can’t you see that the author hasn’t described me, but only me in ’New Men and Old Acres’?” As this was Tom Taylor’s own play, his rage against “Madcap Violet” was very funny!  “There am I, just as you wrote it.  My actions, manners, and clothes in the play are all reproduced.  You ought to feel pleased, not angry.”

When his play “Victims” was being rehearsed at the Court Theater, an old woman and old actress who had, I think, been in the preceding play was not wanted.  The day the management gave her her dismissal, she met Taylor outside the theater, and poured out a long story of distress.  She had not a stocking to her foot, she owed her rent, she was starving.  Wouldn’t Mr. Taylor tell the management what dismissal meant to her?  Wouldn’t he get her taken back?  Mr. Taylor would try, and Mr. Taylor gave her fifteen pounds in the street then and there!

Mrs. Taylor wasn’t surprised.  She only wondered it wasn’t thirty!

“Tom the Adapter” was the Terry dramatist for many years.  Kate played in many of the pieces which, some openly, some deviously, he brought into the English stage from the French.  When Kate married, my turn came, and the interest that he had taken in my sister’s talent he transferred in part to me, although I don’t think he ever thought me her equal.  Floss made her first appearance in the child’s part in Taylor’s play “A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing,” and Marion her first appearance as Ophelia in his version of “Hamlet”—­perhaps “perversion” would be an honester description!  Taylor introduced a “fool” who went about whacking people, including the Prince, by way of brightening up the tragedy.

I never saw my sister’s Ophelia, but I know it was a fine send-off for her and that she must have looked lovely.  Oh, what a pretty young girl she was!  Her golden-brown eyes exactly matched her hair, and she was the winsomest thing imaginable!  From the first she showed talent.

From Taylor’s letters I find—­and, indeed, without them I could not have forgotten—­that the good, kind friend never ceased to work in our interests.  “I have recommended Flossy to play Lady Betty in the country.”  “I have written to the Bancrofts in favor of Forbes-Robertson for Bassanio.” (Evidently this was in answer to a request from me.  Naturally, the Bancrofts wanted someone of higher standing, but was I wrong about J. Forbes-Robertson?  I think not!) “The mother came to see me the other day.  I was extremely sorry to hear the bad news of Tom.”  (Tom was the black sheep of our family, but a fascinating wretch, all the same.) “I rejoice to think of your coming back,” he writes another time, “to show the stage what an actress should be.”  “A thousand thanks for the photographs.  I like the profile best.  It is most Paolo Veronesish and gives the right notion of your Portia, although the color hardly suggests the golden gorgeousness of your dress and the blonde glory of the hair and