’It seemed to me all through as though I were speaking perversely; I could have argued on the other side as passionately as Isabel Bretherton herself; but I was thinking of her dialogue with the Prince, of that feeble, hysterical death-scene, and it irritated me that she, with her beauty, and with British Philistinism and British virtue to back her, should be trampling on Desforets and genius.  But I was conscious of my audacity.  If a certain number of critics have been plain-spoken, Isabel Bretherton has none the less been surrounded for months past with people who have impressed upon her that the modern theatre is a very doubtful business, that her acting is as good as anybody’s, and that her special mission is to regenerate the manners of the stage.  To have the naked, artistic view thrust upon her—­that it is the actress’s business to act, and that if she does that well, whatever may be her personal short-comings, her generation has cause to be grateful to her—­must be repugnant to her.  She, too, talks about art, but it is like a child who learns a string of long words without understanding them.  She walked on beside me while I cooled down and thought what a fool I had been to endanger a friendship which had opened so well,—­her wonderful lips opening once or twice as though to speak, and her quick breath coming and going as she scattered the yellow petals of the flowers far and wide with a sort of mute passion which sent a thrill through me.  It was as though she could not trust herself to speak, and I waited awkwardly on Providence, wishing the others were not so far off.  But suddenly the tension of her mood seemed to give way.  Her smile flashed out, and she turned upon me with a sweet, eager graciousness, quite indescribable.

’"No, we won’t throw stones at her!  She is great, I know, but that other feeling is so strong in me.  I care for my art; it seems to me grand, magnificent!—­but I think I care still more for making people feel it is work a good woman can do, for holding my own in it, and asserting myself against the people who behave as if all actresses had done the things that Madame Desforets has done.  Don’t think me narrow and jealous.  I should hate you and the Stuarts to think that of me.  You have all been so kind to me—­such good, real friends!  I shall never forget this day—­Oh! look, there is the carriage standing up there.  I wish it was the morning and not the evening, and that it might all come again!  I hate the thought of London and that hot theatre to-morrow night.  Oh, my primroses!  What a wretch I am!  I’ve lost them nearly all.  Look, just that bunch over there, Mr. Kendal, before we leave the common.”

’I sprang to get them for her, and brought back a quantity.  She took them in her hand—­how unlike other women she is after all, in spite of her hatred of Bohemia!—­and, raising them to her lips, she waved a farewell through them to the great common lying behind us in the evening sun.  “How beautiful! how beautiful!  This English country is so kind, so friendly!  It has gone to my heart.  Good-night, you wonderful place!”