Mr. Brookfield does not tell this little story in his “Random Reminiscences.”  It is about the only one that he has left out!  To my mind he is the prince of storytellers.  All the cleverness that he should have put into his acting and his play-writing (of which since those early days he has done a great deal) he seems to have put into his life.  I remember him more clearly as a delightful companion than an actor, and he won my heart at once by his kindness to my little daughter Edy, who accompanied me on this tour.  He has too great a sense of humor to resent my inadequate recollection of him.  Did he not in his own book quote gleefully from an obituary notice published on a false report of his death, the summary:  “Never a great actor, he was invaluable in small parts.  But after all it is at his club that he will be most missed!”

In the last act of “Butterfly,” as we called the English version of “Frou-Frou,” where the poor woman is dying, her husband shows her a locket with a picture of her child in it.  Night after night we used a “property” locket, but on my birthday, when we happened to be playing the piece, Charles Kelly bought a silver locket of Indian work and put inside it two little colored photographs of my children, Edy and Teddy, and gave it to me on the stage instead of the “property” one.  When I opened it, I burst into very real tears!  I have often wondered since if the audience that night knew that they were seeing real instead of assumed emotion!  Probably the difference did not tell at all.

At Leeds we produced “Much Ado About Nothing.”  I never played Beatrice as well again.  When I began to “take soundings” from life for my idea of her, I found in my friend Anne Codrington (now Lady Winchilsea) what I wanted.  There was before me a Beatrice—­as fine a lady as ever lived, a great-hearted woman—­beautiful, accomplished, merry, tender.  When Nan Codrington came into a room it was as if the sun came out.  She was the daughter of an admiral, and always tried to make her room look as like a cabin as she could.  “An excellent musician,” as Benedick hints Beatrice was, Nan composed the little song that I sang at the Lyceum in “The Cup,” and very good it was, too.

When Henry Irving put on “Much Ado About Nothing”—­a play which he may be said to have done for me, as he never really liked the part of Benedick—­I was not the same Beatrice at all.  A great actor can do nothing badly, and there was so very much to admire in Henry Irving’s Benedick.  But he gave me little help.  Beatrice must be swift, swift, swift!  Owing to Henry’s rather finicking, deliberate method as Benedick, I could never put the right pace into my part.  I was also feeling unhappy about it, because I had been compelled to give way about a traditional “gag” in the church scene, with which we ended the fourth act.  In my own production we had scorned this gag, and let the curtain come down on Benedick’s line:  “Go, comfort your cousin; I must say she is dead, and so farewell.”  When I was told that we were to descend to the buffoonery of: