Looking backward, I remember many times when I failed in rapidity of utterance, and was "pumped" at moments when swiftness was essential. Pace is the soul of comedy, and to elaborate lines at the expense of pace is disastrous. Curiously enough, I have met and envied this gift of pace in actors who were not conspicuously talented in other respects, and no Rosalind that I have ever seen has had enough of it. Of course, it is not a question of swift utterance only, but of swift thinking. I am able to think more swiftly on the stage now than at the time Charles Reade wrote to me, and I only wish I were young enough to take advantage of it. But youth thinks _slowly_, as a rule. _Vary the pace._ Charles Reade was never tired of saying this, and, indeed, it is one of the foundations of all good acting. "You don't seem quite to realize," he writes in the letter before me, "that uniformity of pace leads inevitably to languor. You should deliver a pistol-shot or two. Remember Philippa is a fiery girl; she can snap. If only for variety, she should snap James' head off when she says, 'Do I _speak_ as if I loved them!'" My memories of the part of Philippa are rather vague, but I know that Reade was right in insisting that I needed more "bite" in the passages when I was dressed as a boy. Though he complimented me on my self-denial in making what he called "some sacrifice of beauty" to pass for a boy, "so that the audience can't say, 'Why, James must be a fool not to see she is a girl,'" he scolded me for my want of bluntness. "Fix your mind on the adjective 'blunt' and the substantive 'pistol-shot'; they will do you good service." They did! And I recommend them to anyone who finds it hard to overcome monotony of pace and languor of diction. "When you come to tell old Surefoot about his daughter's love," the letter goes on, "you should fall into a positive imitation of his manner: crest, motionless, and hands in front, and deliver your preambles with a nasal twang. But at the second invitation to speak out, you should cast this to the winds, and go into the other extreme of bluntness and rapidity. [_Quite right!_] When you meet him after the exposure, you should speak as you are coming to him and stop him in mid-career, and _then_ attack him. You should also (in Act II.) get the pearls back into the tree before you say: 'Oh, I hope he did not see me!'" Yes, I remember that in both these places I used to muddle and blur the effect by doing the business and speaking at the same time. By acting on Reade's suggestion I gained confidence in making a pause.