She had been telling Lady Bell that she remembered when Miss Kemble came to Miss Greathead’s mother’s house in the capacity of a waiting gentlewoman. She had struck everybody by her commanding beauty and her magnificent reading, and she had secured the friendship of each member of the family, so that though she soon quitted Guy’s Cliff to be married to her rejected lover, and to return to the boards—her true sphere—her friends continued to watch her struggles and her progress with interest and rejoicing. So long as she and they lived, Sarah Siddons would be welcome among the Greatheads. Miss Greathead brought her story to a close abruptly, and made room for the young officer in naval uniform. He looked a quiet, reserved, brave man, rather than a crowing, bullying cock of fashion. At the same time he had been indefatigable in scaling banisters and leaping partitions in order to reach the door of Lady Bell Trevor and Miss Greathead’s box. He deserved the seat which he had won next Lady Bell, though, poor fellow, he might not fill it long—and it might be to his loss that he filled it at all. Miss Greathead in her woman’s heart, while she counselled expediency and condemned imprudence with the rest of the quality, guessed what sitting together for an hour or two was to a couple between whom there might soon roll the seas which divide an old world from a new, and these seas alive with transports, frigates, squadrons, hastening to meet the tug of war. The pair were young fools (Miss Greathead was shocked at Lady Bell Trevor—the daughter of an earl, though a spendthrift earl, a jointured widow, though her jointure was not great, while the officer by his uniform was no more than a Captain, and was not a private “fortune,” else he could hardly have failed to be known by name to Miss Greathead—she could not think what Lady Bell meant by thus preparing misery for herself and another). But what would you have? such fools abounded, would not the world be worse if it wanted them? Mrs. Siddons was about to play just such another fool. At least the sailor must fill his seat as a silent partner, for Mrs. Siddons’ acting, and the pit which hung breathless on her words, permitted no chatter in the boxes or elsewhere. The play was that of _Romeo and Juliet_.[1] [1] This is a double anachronism, Mrs. Siddons did not play in town again till later, and did not play Juliet till later still. When Mrs. Siddons took the part of Juliet, she ventured on a new and bold stroke in the middle of her success. Since Lady Bell, a fancy-free childish girl, though a fugitive wife, had been stirred to weep and smile, and hang breathless over the histories of Isabella, Mrs. Beverley, and Euphrasia, Mrs. Siddons had risen to a much loftier range of characters, to her mature masterpieces of Lady Macbeth, Constance, and Queen Katherine.