’This afternoon we have been out in the gondola belonging to this modest establishment, with our magnificent gondolier, Piero, and his boy to convey us to the Lido.  I got Miss Bretherton to talk to me about her Jamaica career.  She made us all laugh with her accounts of the blood-and-thunder pieces in which the audiences at the Kingston theatre revelled.  She seems generally to have played the Bandit’s Daughter, the Smuggler’s Wife, or the European damsel carried off by Indians, or some other thrilling elemental personage of the kind.  The White Lady was, apparently, her first introduction to a more complicated order of play.  It is extraordinary, when one comes to think of it, how little positive dramatic knowledge she must have!  She knows some Shakespeare, I think—­at least, she mentions two or three plays—­and I gather from something she. said that she is now making the inevitable study of Juliet that every actress makes sooner or later; but Sheridan, Goldsmith, and, of course, all the French people, are mere names to her.  When I think of the minute exhaustive training our Paris actors go through, and compare it with such a state of nature as hers, I am amazed at what she has done!  For, after all, you know, she must be able to act to some extent; she must know a great deal more of her business than you and I suspect, or she could not get on at all.’

* * * * *

’August 16.

’It is almost a week, I see, since I wrote to you last.  During that time we have seen a great deal more of Miss Bretherton, sometimes in company with her belongings, sometimes without them, and my impressions of her have ripened very fast.  Oh, my dear Eustace, you have been hasty,—­all the world has been hasty!  Isabel Bretherton’s real self is only now coming to the front, and it is a self which, as I say to myself with astonishment, not even your keen eyes have ever seen—­hardly suspected even.  Should I, myself a woman, have been as blind to a woman’s capabilities, I wonder?  Very likely!  These sudden rich developments of youth are often beyond all calculation.

’Mr. Wallace’s attitude makes me realise more than I otherwise could the past and present condition of things.  He comes and talks to me with amazement of the changes in her tone and outlook, of the girl’s sharpening intellect and growing sensitiveness, and as he recalls incidents and traits of the London season—­confessions or judgments or blunders of hers, and puts them beside the impression which he sees her to be making on Paul and myself—­I begin to understand from his talk and his bewilderment something of the real nature of the case.  Intellectually, it has been “the ugly duckling” over again.  Under all the crude, unfledged imperfection of her young performance, you people who have watched her with your trained critical eyes seem to me never to have suspected the coming wings, the strange nascent power, which is only now asserting itself in the light of day.