Mr. Desmond set himself to watch this scene with a critical eye, for he wished to discover what hope of dramatic success there might be for his old friend’s daughter. Well, she was a very pretty, winning girl, and she spoke her lines in a low soft voice, and with a gentle accent which stamped her as of different breeding from the people who acted with her, but--but she was not a genius; or if in her soul there was by chance some spark of the divine fire, it was choked and obscured by the smoke of her surroundings, and had yet to kindle into flame. She spoke her pretty poetical speeches, and wept, and trembled, and covered her face at the right moment; but she was only a timid young actress trying to act. She was not the Demoiselle Deschapelles--proud, loving, passionate, and maddened by the cheat that had been put upon her. The supreme exaltation of mind, the positive intoxication of the intellect, which constitutes great acting, had not yet come to her. She was timid, self-conscious, nervously anxious to please her audience, and secure the reward of a little hand-clapping and feet-stamping from pit and gallery, when she should have been stung almost to madness by the sense of outraged faith and love abused, as unconscious of spectators as Ariadne at Naxos, or Dido on her funeral pyre. But if Miss St. Albans was not yet an actress, it is to be remembered that she was only nineteen years of age, and had had little more than a twelvemonth’s experience or practice of an art which is perhaps amongst the most difficult and exacting of all arts, and which has no formulæ whereby the student may arrive at some comprehension of its mysteries. It is an art that is rarely taught well, and very often taught badly; an art which demands from its professors a moral courage, and an expenditure of physical energy, intellectual power, and emotional feeling demanded by no other art; and when a man happens to be endowed with those many gifts necessary to perfection in this art, he is spoken of in a patronizing tone as “only an actor;” and it is somewhat a matter of wonder that he should be “received in society.” “She is very young,” thought Mr. Desmond, when the act-drop had fallen on Pauline’s passion and Claude’s remorse, and when the star had been recalled by three particular friends in the pit, and one shrill boy in the gallery. “She is very young, and she is pretty and interesting, and might learn to be a good actress, if there were any school in which she could be taught. But to act with such a conventional ranter and tearer as this De Mortemar, would be destruction to an embryo Siddons. This girl seems eminently sympathetic, and is of the stuff that makes our Faucits and Herberts; but where is she to get the right training?--that is the question.”