We think of a domestic phase in the country afterwards with her two brilliant children, Edith and Gordon Craig, and their painter fatheryof the long triumphant time that followed; when Irving was king at the Lyceum, of the time not so very long ago when she played the nurse in Romeo and Juliet and, as they say, acted everybody else off the stage. girls are inspired at first sight of her to graceful curtseys; bumptious. young men shed before her all their contemporary rudeness and break out, as it were, into ghostly rapiers and plumes. Nobody ever knew her do the awkward thing.
It was James Agate who told me a tale of her quick response to a situation, One night some years ago she, muffled, short-sighted, and halting, was being helped into a cab by an old friend with whom she had. been dining when the driver abruptly came down and said en= thusiastically. "Aren't you Miss Ellen Te. y? I hung over the gal-ery many a time to see you play Juliet when I wore a lad." The el L girlish spirit of fun bubbled up in the invalid old lady, "There," she said gaily to her friend, "didn't tell you I hadn't changer Nowadays she lives mostly down in Kent, devotedly attended, in an old house which is an appropriate setting for so opulent and unagressive a character. (Nobody was ever able to make Ellen Terry wealthy because of her incorrigible habit of giving things away). She is guared from strangers, but her old friends go and take their children for her benedictions. "But they are all so clover!" I have heard hee sa§ of young people on the stage—and doesn't that one speech prove that she is a sort of fairy, since it could never have been uttered by the merely human kind of leading lady?—2. 8, 4
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.