can hardly imagine two worlds, whether outwardly or
inwardly, more wide apart than mine and Miss
Bretherton's.'




CHAPTER V


During the three weeks which elapsed between the two expeditions of the
'Sunday League,' Kendal saw Miss Bretherton two or three times under
varying circumstances. One night he took it into his head to go to the
pit of the _Calliope_, and came away more persuaded than before that as
an actress there was small prospect for her. Had she been an ordinary
mortal, he thought the original stuff in her might have been disciplined
into something really valuable by the common give and take, the normal
rubs and difficulties of her profession. But, as it was, she had been
lifted at once by the force of one natural endowment into a position
which, from the artistic point of view, seemed to him hopeless. Her
instantaneous success--dependent as it was on considerations wholly
outside those of dramatic art--had denied her all the advantages which
are to be won from struggle and from laborious and gradual conquest. And
more than this, it had deprived her of an ideal; it had tended to make
her take her own performance as the measure of the good and possible.
For, naturally, it was too much to expect that she herself should analyse
truly the sources and reasons of her popularity. She must inevitably
believe that some, at least, of it was due to her dramatic talent in
itself. 'Perhaps some of it is,' Kendal would answer himself. 'It is very
possible that I am not quite fair to her. She has all the faults which