'Oh, I have no doubts at all about that,' she said, but with a quick look at him; 'I always feel at once when a part will suit me, and I have fallen in love with this one. It is tragic and passionate, like the _White Lady_, but it is quite a different phase of passion. I am tired of scolding and declaiming. _Elvira_ will give me an opportunity of showing what I can do with something soft and pathetic. I have had such difficulties in deciding upon a play to begin my October season with, and now this seems to me exactly what I want. People prefer me always in something poetical and romantic, and this is new, and the mounting of it might be quite original.' 'And yet I doubt,' said Kendal; 'I think the part of Elvira wants variety, and would it not be well for you to have more of a change? Something with more relief in it, something which would give your lighter vein, which comes in so well in the _White Lady_, more chance?' She frowned a little and shook her head. 'My turn is not that way. I can play a comedy part, of course--every actor ought to be able to--but I don't feel at home in it, and it never gives me pleasure to act.' 'I don't mean a pure light-comedy part, naturally, but something which would be less of a continuous tragic strain than this. Why, almost all the modern tragic plays have their passages of relief, but the texture of _Elvira_ is so much the same throughout,--I cannot conceive a greater demand on any one. And then you must consider your company. Frankly, I cannot imagine a part less suited to Mr. Hawes than Macias; and his difficulties would react on you.' 'I can choose whom I like,' she said abruptly; 'I am not bound to Mr. Hawes.' 'Besides,' he said cautiously, changing his ground a little, 'I should have said--only, of course, you must know much better--that it is a little risky to give the British public such very serious fare as this, and immediately after the _White Lady_. The English theatre-goer never seems to me to take kindly to medievalism--kings and knights and nobles and the fifteenth century are very likely to bore him. Not that I mean to imply for a moment that the play would be a failure in point of popularity. You have got such a hold that you could carry anything through; but I am inclined to think that in _Elvira_ you would be rather fighting against wind and tide, and that, as I said before, it would be a great strain upon you.' 'The public makes no objection to Madame Desforêts in Victor Hugo,' she answered quickly, even sharply. 'Her parts, so far as I know anything about them, are just these romantic parts, and she has made her enormous reputation out of them.' Kendal hesitated. 'The French have a great tradition of them,' he said. 'Racine, after all, was a preparation for Victor Hugo.'