In “Masks and Faces” Taylor and Reade had collaborated, and the exact share of each in the result was left to one’s own discernment.  I remember saying to Taylor one night at dinner when Reade was sitting opposite me, that I wished he (Taylor) would write me a part like that.  “If only I could have an original part like Peg!”

Charles Reade, after fixing me with his amused and very glittering eye, said across the table:  “I have something for your private ear, Madam, after this repast!” And he came up with the ladies, sat by me, and, calling me “an artful toad”—­a favorite expression of his for me!—­told me that he, Charles Reade and no other, had written every line of Peg, and that I ought to have known it.  I didn’t know, as a matter of fact, but perhaps it was stupid of me.  There was more of Tom Taylor in Mabel Vane.

I played five parts in all at the Prince of Wales’s, and I think I may claim that the Bancrofts found me a useful actress—­ever the dull height of my ambition!  They wanted Byron—­the author of “Our Boys”—­to write me a part in the new play, which they had ordered from him, but when “Wrinkles” turned up there was no part which they felt they could offer me, and I think Coghlan was also not included in the cast.  At any rate, he was free to take me to see Henry Irving act.  Coghlan was always raving about Irving at this time.  He said that one evening spent in watching him act was the best education an actor could have.  Seeing other people act, even if they are not Irvings, is always an education to us.  I have never been to a theater yet without learning something.  It must have been in the spring of 1876 that I received this note: 

“Will you come in our box on Tuesday for Queen Mary?  Ever yours,

“CHARLES T. COGHLAN.

“P.S.—­I am afraid that they will soon have to smooth their wrinkled front of the P. of W. Alas!  Helas!  Ah, me!”

This postscript, I think, must have referred to the approaching withdrawal of “Wrinkles” from the Prince of Wales’s, and the return of Coghlan and myself to the cast.

Meanwhile, we went to see Irving’s King Philip.

Well, I can only say that he never did anything better to the day of his death.  Never shall I forget his expression and manner when Miss Bateman, as Queen Mary (she was very good, by the way), was pouring out her heart to him.  The horrid, dead look, the cruel unresponsiveness, the indifference of the creature!  While the poor woman protested and wept, he went on polishing up his ring!  Then the tone in which he asked: 

“Is dinner ready?”

It was the perfection of quiet malignity and cruelty.

The extraordinary advance that he had made since the days when we had acted together at the Queen’s Theater did not occur to me.  I was just spellbound by a study in cruelty, which seemed to me a triumphant assertion of the power of the actor to create as well as to interpret, for Tennyson never suggested half what Henry Irving did.