The little warning was in season, for the poor White Lady had but too many after opportunities of blurring the impression she had made. In the great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition. In the two or three fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term 'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of long and complex processes of education. There, indeed, was the bald, plain fact--the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education. It was evident that her technical training had been of the roughest. In all technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air, which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had been of the poorest type. And in all other respects--when it came to interpretation or creation--she was spoilt by her entire want of that inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the present. For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge: she must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training--in itself the outcome of a long tradition--or she must have the knowledge which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought and experience. Miss Bretherton had neither. She had extraordinary beauty and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness. He was not inclined to go so far as to call it 'power.' But this quickness, which would have been promising in a _debutante_ less richly endowed on the physical side, seemed to him to have no future in her. 'It will be checked,' he said to himself, 'by her beauty and all that flows from it. She must come to depend more and more on the physical charm, and on that only. The whole pressure of her success is and will be that way.'