When I was a little child I lived in a great asylum for the insane. It was a world outside of the world, where realities had to be imagined and where, even through those excursions in illusions and hallucinations, there ran a strange loneliness. The world can never be as lonely in those places where the mind has never come as in a place where the mind has gone. There were no books to read in this place except the great volumes in the Patients’ Library; and I had read them all. There was no one to ask about anything. There was no way to make a connection with “life.” Out there in the world they were working and thinking; here we were still. Very early I had given up every one except the Insane. The others knew nothing about anything, or knew only uninteresting facts. From the Insane I could get everything. They knew everything about nothing, and were my authority; but beyond that there was a silence. Who had made the pictures, the books and the music in the world? And how had they made them? And how could you tell the makers from just people? Did they have a light around their heads? Were there any of them in the world now? And would I ever see one? One day a name came to me suddenly. Some one was talking of a “wicked French actress” who was touring America:—“Sarah Bernhardt.” Even when _they_ said it the name had a light around it! She would come as far as St. Louis. I would go at once. But I was too little. I had no money.... I would run away. I would walk the whole distance to her. But she would be gone before I could get there.... Some day I would go to Paris. Other people had got that far. I would go on living for that. And then she came again! I was there, the first night, sitting in the balcony with some other art students. We had sold our futures to sit so close. I was burning with hot excitement and shaking with cold fear until the moment—it was _Camille_—when the long french doors opened and she came languidly and as if from a great distance; hands extended as if balancing her exquisitely upon an enchanted atmosphere, her suave voluptuous tawny head bent slightly down. I threw myself mind and soul into the waves of that caressing fiery magic which swept out to us. After this came a new agony: the critics had said there would never be another. There was Duse, whom I have never seen; but she has always filled me with a restless trouble. What artist has ever so dared to offend Art? Never in all her life as an actress did she choose a play in which her great art could come into its own. It always seems that there is more laid upon the artist than a willingness to serve; it is almost a command to serve. Did Duse deny the command and by so doing add the martyrdom of Art to a great personal tragedy? Or was it because she tried to create an art out of nature itself that Art revenged itself upon her through nature? As an actress she had “no resources outside simple human nature.” As a woman she had no resource in Art.