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 so perfect, so finely fashioned to all beautiful uses!  Let other people go through the toil to acquire; their aim is truth:  but here is beauty in its quintessence, and what is beauty but three parts of truth?  Beauty is harmony with the universal order, a revelation of laws and perfections of which, in our common groping through a dull world, we find in general nothing to remind us.  And if so, what folly to ask of a human creature that it should be more than beautiful!  It is a messenger from the gods, and we treat it as if it were any common traveller along the highway of life, and cross-examine it for its credentials instead of raising our altar and sacrificing to it with grateful hearts!

’That was my latest impression of Friday night.  But, naturally, by Saturday morning I had returned to the rational point of view.  The mind’s morning climate is removed by many degrees from that of the evening; and the critical revolt which the whole spectacle of the White Lady had originally roused in me revived in all its force.  I began, indeed, to feel as if I and humanity, with its long laborious tradition, were on one side, holding our own against a young and arrogant aggressor—­namely, beauty, in the person of Miss Bretherton!  How many men and women, I thought, have laboured and struggled and died in the effort to reach a higher and higher perfection in one single art, and are they to be outdone, eclipsed in a moment, by something which is a mere freak of nature, something which, like the lilies of the field, has neither toiled nor spun, and yet claims the special inheritance and reward of those who have!  It seemed to me as though my feeling in her presence of the night before, as if the sudden overthrow of the critical resistance in me had been a kind of treachery to the human cause.  Beauty has power enough, I found myself reflecting with some fierceness,—­let us withhold from her a sway and a prerogative which are not rightfully hers; let us defend against her that store of human sympathy which is the proper reward, not of her facile and heaven-born perfections, but of labour and intelligence, of all that is complex and tenacious in the workings of the human spirit.