’The reference, of course, meant that Paul had been reading to her his favourite Paradoxe sur le Comedien, and that she had been stimulated, but not converted, by the famous contention that the actor should be the mere “cold and tranquil spectator,” the imitator of other men’s feelings, while possessing none of his own.  He naturally would have argued, but I would not have it, and made her rest.  She was quite worn out with the effort, and I do not like this excessive fatigue of hers.  I often wonder whether the life she is leading is not too exciting for her.  This is supposed to be her holiday, and she is really going through more brain-waste than she has ever done in her life before!  Paul is throwing his whole energies into one thing only, the training of Miss Bretherton; and he is a man of forty-eight, with an immense experience, and she a girl of twenty-one, with everything to learn, and as easily excited as he is capable of exciting her.  I really must keep him in check.

’Mr. Wallace, when we had sent her home across the canal—­their apartment is on the other side, farther up towards the railway station—­could not say enough to me of his amazement at the change in her.

’"What have you done to her?” he asked.  “I can hardly recognise the old Miss Bretherton at all.  Is it really not yet four months since your brother and I went to see her in the White Lady?  Why, you have bewitched her!”

’"We have done something, I admit,” I said; “but the power you see developed in her now was roused in her when months ago she first came in contact with the new world and the new ideal which you and Eustace represented to her.”

’There, my dear Eustace, have I given you your due?  Oh, Miss Bretherton says so many kind things about you!  I’ll take especial pains to tell you some of them next time I write.’

* * * * *

WALLACE TO KENDAL.

’VENICE, August 27.

’MY DEAR KENDAL—­This has been a day of events which, I believe, will interest you as much as they did me.  I told Madame de Chateauvieux that I should write to you to-night, and my letter, she says, must do in place of one from her for a day or two.  We have been to Torcello to-day—­your sister, M. de Chateauvieux, Miss Bretherton, and I. The expedition itself was delightful, but that I have no time to describe.  I only want to tell you what happened when we got to Torcello.

’But first, you will, of course, know from your sister’s letters—­she tells me she writes to you twice a week—­how absorbed we have all been in the artistic progress of Miss Bretherton.  I myself never saw such a change, such an extraordinary development in any one.  How was it that you and I did not see farther into her?  I see now, as I look back upon her old self, that the new self was there in germ.  But I think perhaps it may have been the vast disproportion of her celebrity to her performance that blinded us to the promise in her; it was irritation with the public that made us deliver an over-hasty verdict on her.