was touched and pleased, as one is pleased when a robin perches on
one's hand.

From that time, as the precious bundle of his letters shows, he became
the friend of all of us--myself, my husband, and the children; though
with an increased intimacy from the 'nineties onward. In a subsequent
chapter I will try and summarize the general mark left on me by his
fruitful and stainless life. His letter to me about _Miss Bretherton_ is
dated December 9, 1884. He had already come to see me about it, and
there was never any critical discussion like his, for its suggestion of
a hundred points of view, its flashing of unexpected lights, its witness
to the depth and richness of his own artistic knowledge.

The whole thing is delicate and distinguished [he wrote me] and the
reader has the pleasure and security of feeling that he is with a
woman (distinctly a woman!) who knows how (rare bird!) to write. I
think your idea, your situation, interesting in a high degree--But
[and then come a series of most convincing "buts"! He objects
strongly to the happy ending]. I wish that your actress had been
carried away from Kendal [her critical lover, who worships herself,
but despises her art] altogether, carried away by the current of her
artistic life, the sudden growth of her power, and the excitement,
the ferocity and egotism (those of the artist realizing success, I
mean; I allude merely to the normal dose of those elements) which
the effort to create, to "arrive" (once she had had a glimpse of her
possible successes) would have brought with it. (Excuse that
abominable sentence.) Isabel, the Isabel you describe, has too much
to spare for Kendal--Kendal being what he is; and one doesn't feel
her, see her, enough, as the pushing actress, the _cabotine_! She
lapses toward him as if she were a failure, whereas you make her out