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 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.