ld have been imagined.
Paul sat at a little table in front of the rest of us; he was to read
Romeo and the Nurse in the scenes she had chosen, while in the background
were the Worralls and Lucy Bretherton (the little crippled sister), Mr.
Wallace, and myself. She did the balcony scene, the morning scene with
Romeo, the scene with the nurse after Tybalt's death, and the scene of
the philtre. There is an old sundial in the garden, which caught the
moonbeams. She leaned her arms upon it, her eyes fixed upon the throbbing
moonlit sky, her white brocaded dress glistening here and there in the
pale light--a vision of perfect beauty. And when she began her sighing
appeal--

"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"

--it seemed to me as if the night--the passionate Italian night--had
found its voice--the only voice which fitted it.

'Afterwards I tried as much as possible to shake off the impressions
peculiar to the scene itself to think of her under the ordinary
conditions of the stage, to judge her purely as an actress. In the love
scenes there seemed hardly anything to find fault with. I thought I could
trace in many places the influence of her constant dramatic talks and
exercises with Paul. The flow of passion was continuous and electric, but
marked by all the simpleness, all the sweetness, all the young winsome
extravagance which belong to Juliet. The great scene with the Nurse had
many fine things in it; she has evidently worked hard at it line by line,
and that speech of Juliet's, with its extraordinary dramatic
capabilities--

"Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?"--

was given with admirable variety and suppleness of intonation. The dreary
sweetness of her

"_Banished!_ that one word _banished!_"

still lives with me, and her gestures as she paced restlessly along the
little strip of moonlit path. The speech before she takes the potion was
the least satisfactory of all; the ghastliness and horror of it are
beyond her resources as yet; she could not infuse them with that terrible
beauty which Desforets would have given to every line. But where is the
English actress that has ever yet succeeded in it?

We were all silent for a minute after her great cry--

"Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, I drink to thee!"--

had died upon our ears. And then, while we applauded her, she came
forward listlessly, her beautiful head drooping, and approached Paul like
a child that has said its lesson badly.

'"I can't do it, t