"Mr. Bernard Shaw lives in daily fear of Mrs. Langtry recovering sufficiently from her natural resentment of his ill manners to re-open the subject. "Mr. Bernard Shaw begs Miss Ellen Terry to answer this letter. "Mr. Bernard Shaw is looking for a new cottage or house in the country and wants advice on the subject. "Mr. Bernard Shaw craves for the sight of Miss Ellen Terry's once familiar hand-writing." Isn't it Horace who says that there is nothing to prevent the man who laughs from speaking the truth? I think I have heard so, and I always remember it coupled with the name of Bernard Shaw. He laughs, but he speaks the truth.[11] The first time he came to my house I was not present, but a young American lady, who had long adored him from the other side of the Atlantic, took my place as hostess. I had to be at the theatre, as usual, but I took great pains to have everything looking nice; I spent a long time putting out my best blue china, and ordered a splendid dinner, quite forgetting that the honoured guest usually dined off a Plasmon biscuit and a bean. _Mr. Shaw--a Gentle Creature with "Brainstorms"_ Mr. Shaw read "Arms and the Man" to my young American friend, Miss Sally Fairchild, without even going into the dining-room where the blue china was spread out to delight his eye. My daughter, Edy, was present at the reading, and appeared so much absorbed in some embroidery and paid the reader so few compliments about his play, that he expressed the opinion that she behaved as if she had been married to him for twenty years. The first time I ever saw Mr. Shaw in the flesh--I hope he will pardon me such an anti-vegetarian expression--was when he took his call after the first production of "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" by the Stage Society. He was quite unlike what I had imagined from his letters. [Illustration: _By permission of Frederick H. Evans_ GEORGE BERNARD SHAW WHOSE PLAY, "CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION," WRITTEN FOR MISS TERRY, WAS PRODUCED BY HER IN 1906 ] When at last I was able to play in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion" I found Bernard Shaw wonderfully patient at rehearsal. I look upon him as a good, kind, gentle creature whose "brainstorms" are due to the Irishman's love of a fight; they never spring from malice or anger. It doesn't answer to take Bernard Shaw seriously. He is not a man of convictions; that is one of the charms of his plays, to me, at least. One never knows how the cat is really jumping. But it _jumps_. Bernard Shaw is alive, with nine lives, like the cat. _Shakespeare's Rabelaisian Mood_ On Whit Monday, 1902, I received a telegram from Mr. Tree saying that he was coming down to Winchelsea to see me on "an important matter of business." I was at the time suffering from considerable depression about the future.