’But if you did not understand her quite, you have enormously helped her; so much I will tell you for your comfort.  She said to me yesterday abruptly—­we were alone in our gondola, far out on the lagoon—­“Did your brother ever tell you of a conversation he and I had in the woods at Nuneham about Mr. Wallace’s play?”

’"Yes,” I answered with outward boldness, but a little inward trepidation; “I have not known anything distress him so much for a long time.  He thought you had misunderstood him.”

’"No,” she said quietly, but as it seemed to me with an undercurrent of emotion in her voice; “I did not misunderstand him.  He meant what he said, and I would have forced the truth from him, whatever happened.  I was determined to make him show me what he felt.  That London season was sometimes terrible to me.  I seemed to myself to be living in two worlds—­one a world in which there was always a sea of faces opposite to me, or crowds about me, and a praise ringing in my ears which was enough to turn anybody’s head, but which after a while repelled me as if there was something humiliating in it; and then, on the other side, a little inner world of people I cared for and respected, who looked at me kindly, and thought for me, but to whom as an actress I was just of no account at all!  It was your brother who first roused that sense in me; it was so strange and painful, for how could I help at first believing in all the hubbub and the applause?”

’"Poor child!” I said, reaching out my hand for one of hers.  “Did Eustace make himself disagreeable to you?”

’"It was more, I think,” she answered, as if reflecting, “the standard he always seemed to carry about with him than anything connected with my own work.  At least, of course, I mean before that Nuneham day.  Ah, that Nuneham day!  It cut deep.”

’She turned away from me, and leant over the side of the boat, so that I could not see her face.

’"You forced it out of Eustace, you know,” I said, trying to laugh at her, “you uncompromising young person!  Of course, he flattered himself that you forgot all about his preaching the moment you got home.  Men always make themselves believe what they want to believe.”

’"Why should he want to believe so?” she replied quickly.  “I had half foreseen it, I had forced it from him, and yet I felt it like a blow!  It cost me a sleepless night, and some—­well, some very bitter tears.  Not that the tears were a new experience.  How often, after all that noise at the theatre, have I gone home and cried myself to sleep over the impossibility of doing what I wanted to do, of moving those hundreds of people, of making them feel, and of putting my own feeling into shape!  But that night, and with my sense of illness just then, I saw myself—­it seemed to me quite in the near future—­grown old and ugly, a forgotten failure, without any of those memories which console people who have been great when they must give up.  I felt myself struggling against such a weight of ignorance, of bad habits, of unfavourable surroundings.  How was I ever to get free and to reverse that judgment of Mr. Kendal’s?  My very success stood in my way, How was ‘Miss Bretherton’ to put herself to school?”