iss Bretherton.
Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and
one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital
is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the
theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of
managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her
comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind,
for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks
more and her engagement at the _Calliope_ will be over. There are other
theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet;
but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I
imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency
object to her having her own way. "I am wild to get to Italy," she said
to me in her emphatic, impetuous way. "Sir Walter Rutherford has talked
to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it. I long to have
done with London and be off! This English sun seems to me so chilly," and
she drew her winter cloak about her with a little shiver, although the
day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton. "I
come from such warmth, and I loved it. I have been making acquaintance
with all sorts of horrors since I came to London--face-ache and
rheumatism and colds!--I scarcely knew there were such things in the
world. And I never knew what it was to be tired before. Sometimes I can
hardly drag through my work. I hate it so: it makes me cross like a
naughty child!"

'"Do you know," I said, flinging myself down beside her on the grass and
looking up at her, "that it's altogether wrong? Nature never meant you to
feel tired; it's monstrous, it's against the natural order of things!"

'"It's London," she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that
is so prettily pathetic. "I have the roar in my ears all day, and it
seems to be humming through my sleep at night. And then the crowd, and
the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things! But I
have only a few weeks more," she added, brightening, "and then by October
I shall be more used to Europe--the climate and the life."

'I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous
strength is making against London. All my nursing of you, Marie, and of
our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find
myself taking oft