strength involved in the general situation. To do this, it was necessary
to exaggerate and emphasise all the criticisms that had ever been brought
against beauty in high dramatic place, while, at the same time, charm and
loveliness were inseparable from the main conception. And further, it was
sought to show that, although the English susceptibility to physical
charm--susceptibility greater here, in matters of art, than it is in
France--may have, and often does have, a hindering effect upon the
artist, still, there are other influences in a great society which are
constantly tending to neutralise this effect; in other words, that even
in England an actress may win her way by youth and beauty, and still
achieve by labour and desert another and a greater fame.

These were the ideas on which this little sketch was based, and in
working them out the writer has not been conscious of any portraiture of
individuals. Whatever attractiveness she may have succeeded in giving to
her heroine is no doubt the shadow, so to speak, of a real influence so
strong that no one writing of the English stage at the present moment can
easily escape it; but otherwise everything is fanciful, the outcome, and
indeed, too much the outcome, of certain critical ideas. And in the
details of the story there has been no chronicling of persons; all the
minor and subsidiary figures are imaginary, devised so as to illustrate
to the best of the writer's ability the various influences which are
continually brought to bear upon the artist in the London of to-day.
There are traits and reminiscences of actual experience in the
book,--what story was ever without them? But no living person has been
drawn, and no living person has any just reason to think himself or
herself aggrieved by any sentence which it contains.