Of course she had in due course to support Lord Dundreary in "Our American Cousin," a play which, not very good to begin with, had, for the sake of Sothern's superbly droll performance, been whittled down to a mere nothing. With the exception of the characters of Asa Trenchard (and he had been converted into an absurd caricature of an American) and Mary Meredith, the one sympathetic woman of the piece, the other parts were indeed thankless ones, and it seems impossible to think that Ellen Terry, our greatest living Shakespearean actress, was once wasted on the insipid _role_ of Georgina, the affected girl on whom Dundreary was "spoony." Georgina was simply a foil for the ridiculous fop's unconscious and wonderfully uttered witticisms, and she had little more to do than to keep her countenance while the audiences roared with laughter at Sothern's wild but always coherent absurdities of speech and manner. Under this trying ordeal I have seen many Georginas break down and laugh heartily with their "kind friends in front," and I have reason to know that the mischief-loving Sothern, at the risk of missing his own points, often tried to make them do so. Of the sweet "Spirit of the Future," as this stage lay figure playing with the restless "Spirit of the Hour," Clement Scott has said:-- "When Ellen Terry played Georgina she was a young girl of enchanting loveliness. She was the ideal of every pre-Raphaelite painter, and had hair, as De Musset says, '_comme le blé_.' I always sympathised with Dundreary when he, within whispering distance of Ellen Terry's harvest-coloured hair, said: 'It makes a fellow feel awkward when he's talking to the back of a person's head.'" In the same inexhaustible play she was called upon, a little later on, to enact the prettily limned Mary Meredith. She says she did it "vilely"; but neither critics nor audiences agreed with her. Sothern, both on and off the stage, and both with men and women, was one of the most popular beings of his day, and it is therefore all the more surprising to hear Ellen Terry say that she could never like him. She admired him, but she could not understand his mania for practical joking. By some this has been thought odd, for it is known that she herself dearly loves a joke. I think I can explain her prejudice. Having begun one of his "sells," as he called them, Sothern did not know when to leave off, and he never seemed to reflect that it was unkind to practise his pleasantries on nervous young actors.