Celia is at first indifferent and frivolous, thinking more of her bridal toilet than of the bond which it symbolizes. Little by little she awakens to deeper thought and deeper feeling, and here, slender as Mr. Flittergilt’s work is, there is scope for the highest art. Curiously different is the actress of to-day from the girl whose ineptitude the strolling company at Eborsham had despised. There is a brightness and spontaneity about her comedy, a simple artless tenderness in her touches of sentiment, which show the untaught actress—the actress whose art has grown out of her own depth of feeling, whose acting is the outcome of a rich and thoughtful mind rather than the hard and dry result of tuition and study, or the mechanical art of imitation. Impulse and fancy give their bright brief flashes of light and colour to the interpretation, and the dramatist’s creation lives and moves before the audience,—not a mere mouthpiece for smart sayings or graceful bits of sentiment—but a being with a soul, an original absolute creation of an original mind. The audience are enchanted, Mr. Flittergilt is in fits of admiration of himself and the actress. ‘By Jove, that girl is as good as Nesbitt, and my dialogue is equal to Sheridan’s!’ he ejaculates, when the first act is over, and the rashly enthusiastic, without waiting for the end, begin to clamour for the author. And Maurice—well, Maurice sits in a brown study, far back in the box, and unseen by the actors, astride upon his chair, his arms folded upon the back of it, his chin upon his folded arms, the image of intense contemplation. ‘By heaven, the girl is a genius,’ he says to himself. ‘I thought there was something noble about her, but I did not think two short years would work such a change as this.’ At the end of the piece Justina was received with what it is the fashion to call an ovation. There were no bouquets thrown to her, for these floral offerings are generally pre-arranged by the friends and admirers of an actress, and Justina had neither friends nor admirers in all the great city to plan her triumph. She had conquered by the simple force of an art which was spontaneous and unstudied as the singing of a nightingale. Time and practice had made her mistress of the mechanism of her art, had familiarized her with the glare of the lights and the strange faces of the crowd, had made her as much at her ease on the stage as in her own room. The rest had come unawares, it had come with the ripening of her mind, come with the thoughtfulness and depth of feeling that had been the growth of that early disappointment, that first brief dream of love, with its sad sudden ending.