Bretherton, her long phantom dress lying in white folds about her, her
uncle and aunt and her manager standing near. Every detail of the
picture--the spot of brilliant light bounded on all sides by dim,
far-reaching vistas of shadow, the figures hurrying across the back of
the stage, the moving ghost-like workmen all around, and in the midst
that white-hooded, languid figure--revived in Kendal'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