To-day my friend Annabel Lee and I went to the theater and we saw a wonderful and fascinating woman with long dark-red hair upon the stage. She is attractive, that red-haired woman--adorably attractive. And she reminds one of many things. Annabel Lee was greatly interested in her acting, and was charmed with herself--and so was I. “Do you suppose she finds life very delightful?” I said to my friend. “I don’t suppose,” my friend replied, “she is of the sort that considers whether or not life is delightful. Probably her work is hard enough to keep her out of mischief of any kind.” Whereupon we both fell to thinking how fortunate are they whose work is hard enough to keep them out of mischief of any kind. “But there must be,” I said, “some months, perhaps in the summer, when she doesn’t work. I have heard that some actors take houses among the mountains and do their own housework for recreation.” “I,” said Annabel Lee, “can not quite imagine this woman with the red hair making bread and scouring pans and kettles for pleasure. But very likely she sometimes goes into the country for vacations, and I can fancy her doing the various small enjoyable things that celebrities can afford to do--like wading barefooted in a narrow brooklet, or swinging high and recklessly in a barrel-stave hammock.” “And since she is so adorable on the stage,” I exclaimed, “how altogether enchanting she would be wading in the brooklet or swinging in the barrel-stave hammock--she with the long, red hair! Perhaps it would even be braided down her back in two long tails.” It is a picture that haunts me--Mrs. Fiske in the midst of her vacation doing the small enjoyable things. “Of course,” said my friend Annabel Lee, “we don’t _know_ that she doesn’t spend her vacations in a fine, conventional, stupid yacht, or at some magnificent, insipid American or English country house. We can only give her the benefit of the doubt.” “Yes, the benefit of the doubt,” I replied. How fascinating she was, to be sure, with her personality merged in that of Mary Magdalene! The Magdalene is no longer a shadowy ideal with a somewhat buxom body, scantily draped, with indefinite hair and with the lifeless beauty that the old masters paint. Nor is she quite the woman of the scriptures who is presented to one’s mind without that quality which is called local coloring, and with too much of the quality that is ever present with the women in the scriptures--a something between uncleanness and final complete redemption.