Henry did not wag an eyelid.

“I see.  In mourning for her father.”

“No, not exactly that.  I think red was the mourning color of the period.  But black seems to me right—­like the character, like the situation.”

“Would you put the dresses on?” said Henry gravely.

At that minute Walter Lacy came up, that very Walter Lacy who had been with Charles Kean when I was a child, and who now acted as adviser to Henry Irving in his Shakespearean productions.

“Ah, here’s Lacy.  Would you mind, Miss Terry, telling Mr. Lacy what you are going to wear?”

Rather surprised, but still unsuspecting, I told Lacy all over again.  Pink in the first scene, yellow in the second, black—­

You should have seen Lacy’s face at the word “black.”  He was going to burst out, but Henry stopped him.  He was more diplomatic than that!

“They generally wear white, don’t they?”

“I believe so,” I answered, “but black is more interesting.”

“I should have thought you would look much better in white.”

“Oh, no!” I said.

And then they dropped the subject for that day.  It was clever of him!

The next day Lacy came up to me: 

“You didn’t really mean that you are going to wear black in the mad scene?”

“Yes, I did.  Why not?”

“Why not! My God!  Madam, there must be only one black figure in this play, and that’s Hamlet!”

I did feel a fool.  What a blundering donkey I had been not to see it before!  I was very thrifty in those days, and the thought of having been the cause of needless expense worried me.  So instead of the crepe de Chine and miniver, which had been used for the black dress, I had for the white dress Bolton sheeting and rabbit, and I believe it looked better.

The incident, whether Henry was right or not, led me to see that, although I knew more of art and archaeology in dress than he did, he had a finer sense of what was right for the scene.  After this he always consulted me about the costumes, but if he said:  “I want such and such a scene to be kept dark and mysterious,” I knew better than to try and introduce pale-colored dresses into it.

Henry always had a fondness for “the old actor,” and would engage him in preference to the tyro any day.  “I can trust them,” he explained briefly.

In the cast of “Hamlet” Mr. Forrester, Mr. Chippendale, and Tom Mead worthily repaid the trust.  Mead, in spite of a terrible excellence in “Meadisms”—­he substituted the most excruciatingly funny words for Shakespeare’s when his memory of the text failed—­was a remarkable actor.  His voice as the Ghost was beautiful, and his appearance splendid.  With his deep-set eyes, hawklike nose, and clear brow, he reminded me of the Rameses head in the British Museum.