"My holiday is nearly over, and somehow I wish it was just going to begin! However, I feel pretty content. Since I last saw you I have been N., S., E., and W. I have seen _very few_ people, and I have been absorbed by Lady Mac, who is _quite unlike_ her portrait by Mrs. Siddons! She is _most feminine_, and altogether, now that I have come to _know the lady well_, I think the _portrait is much the grander of the two_! But I mean to try at a true _likeness_, as it is more within my means. Like a good friend, send on the notes you spoke of--the notes on Macbeth. I'm staying here to get away from people and to be quiet, but I shall come up for your play, 'Widow Winsome,' if you do it on the 15th. I'm _so_ glad you'll have a good cast. Katie Rorke is _quite_ the best of our young ones." Kate Rorke, it will be remembered, commenced her stage career at the Court Theatre when Ellen Terry was in the first flush of her success as Olivia. This clearly shows that she was intent on giving her own original reading of Lady Macbeth. Clement Scott has recorded a very interesting conversation that took place between them after the production. In the course of it she said:-- "Although I know I cannot do what I want to do in this part, I don't even _want_ to be a 'fiend,' and I _can't_ believe for a moment that Lady Macbeth did _conceive_ that murder--that _one_ murder. Most women break the law during their lives; few women realise the consequences of what they do to-day.... I do believe that at the end of that banquet, that poor wretched creature was brought through agony and sin to repentance, and was forgiven. Surely she called the spirits to be made bad, because she knew she was not so very bad?" And in response to the inquiry--"But was Lady Macbeth good?" she said:-- "No, she was not good, but not so much worse than many women you know.... Was it not nice of an actress--she sent me Mrs. Siddons' shoes! not to wear, but to keep. I wish I could have stood in 'em! She played Lady Macbeth--_her_ Lady Macbeth, not Shakespeare's; and if I _could_ I would have done hers, for Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth was a fool to it. But, at the same time, I don't think I'd even care to try to imitate her imitators.... I wish I could have seen Helen Faucit in the part. I do believe she was the rightest, although not to be looked at by the side of the Siddons portrait as a single effective figure." Now all this goes to prove that though Ellen Terry believed that the "Siddons" view of the character was the most effective from the theatrical point of view, she was not what Shakespeare meant, and that she had resolutely determined to give it her own reading.