Once before I called Mary Garden a great decorative actress. I am using decoration in the sense in which it is used in painting, where elimination and not elaboration is used to emphasize the intention of line and color. She carries this same idea into her costumes: she can give you the whole spirit and atmosphere of an historical costume by a mere silhouette of its lines. And she can draw in the whole psychology of a scene with one line of her body—the line of her walk. If she is to dominate a situation with her intellect or her beauty she walks from the center of her intelligence, which is the head, giving a length of line that makes the slightest step a stride; if it is a matter of the soul she walks from the center of her presence, which is the top plane of the chest, moving like a Presence—not like a being; when it is love she walks straight from her heart, with a line that repeats a pain; when it is passion she sinks the line to a point lower than the hip, and prowls destructively. In _Thaïs_, when she is trying to enthrall the monk, she winds about the stage and him, bending slightly in hip and knee. Later, in a scene of contest with him, she lifts the line to her consciousness and stands to the height of her belief in her own beauty and power. When she goes over to the nuns, she moves away with that beautiful unconsciousness of action which is never so mysteriously perfect a thing as in Mélisande. There is nothing so thrilling in life to me as to watch this living painting which moves in rhythm like a frieze. How I should love to see her working out her designs against a background that has carried out the line of intention of a poem. Imagine Mary Garden in the _Tristan_ Liebestod, coming in upon a scene in which the short lines of a truncated castle rise from the endless planes of a black and purple sea; a fleet of violins in the orchestra singing the Love Death and Mary challenging all this dark negation with the one word “Tristan,” in a voice which is a singing pain. But most of all I wish some one would make operas for her of those exotic things that lie outside of common experience, but which have their place in life: nature too heavily laden or too fantastically free or too weirdly true; bright precious hidden things, corroded jewels, heavy-hanging flowers of sleep—moon-flowers of the day. How passionately and reverently she performed that ritual of dark heat and sex savagery which is _Salome_. The electric abundance of life in Mary Garden and the splendor of her body are dazzling at first. But it is a stillness of soul, an exaltation of passion which really stamp her. There is something inviolate about her. Other actresses may be soulful, grave, or innocent; but Mary Garden has authentic purity.