al's memory whenever in
after days his thoughts went wandering back to the first moment of real
contact between his own personality and that of Isabel Bretherton.

CHAPTER IV

A few days after the performance of the _White Lady_, Kendal, in the
course of his weekly letter to his sister, sent her a fairly-detailed
account of the evening, including the interview with her after the play,
which had left two or three very marked impressions upon him. 'I wish,'
he wrote, 'I could only convey to you a sense of her personal charm such
as might balance the impression of her artistic defects, which I suppose
this account of mine cannot but leave on you. When I came away that night
after our conversation with her I had entirely forgotten her failure as
an actress, and it is only later, since I have thought over the evening
in detail, that I have returned to my first standpoint of wonder at the
easy toleration of the English public. When you are actually with her,
talking to her, looking at her, Forbes's attitude is the only possible
and reasonable one. What does art, or cultivation, or training matter!--I
found myself saying, as I walked home, in echo of him,--so long as Nature
will only condescend once in a hundred years to produce for us a creature
so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses! Let other people
go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth: but here is beauty in
its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth? Beauty is
harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of
which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general
nothing to remind us. And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature
that it should be more than beautiful! It is a messenger from the gods,
and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of
life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our
altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!

'That was my latest impression of Friday night. But, naturally, by
Saturday morning I had returned to the rational point of view. The mind's
morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and
the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of the _White Lady_ had
originally roused in me revived in all its force. I began, indeed, to
feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one
side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor--namel