To the Lothario of Palmer and Horatio of Bensley, Mrs. Siddons next played Calista, in another of Rowe's tragedies, the "Fair Penitent,"--that impersonation of pride, anguish, anger, shame, and sorrow, and with undiminished success. But in Belvidera (to the Jaffier of Brereton, and Pierre of Bensley) she seems to have surpassed all she had hitherto accomplished over the minds and feelings of the audience, whom she fairly electrified. Her Belvidera, with its honest, passionate, overwhelming love and truth, was well contrasted with her scorn and magnificence of demeanour in Zara. The whole season was one of triumph,--the only dark spot in which was the failure of Hull's "Fatal Interview," in which she played Mrs. Montague, but with so little effect, where, indeed, no opportunity was given her of creating any, as to injure for a moment a prestige which grew all bright again by her performance of Calista. It is singular that she liked her part in Hull's play--"a new tragedy, in prose," she writes; "a most affecting play, in which I have a part that I like very much;" but she adds, from her house, 149 Strand, "the 'Fatal Interview' has been played three times, and is quite done with. It was the dullest of all representations." Of Mrs. Crawford (Barry) the new actress entertained some small fears, which are not too generously expressed in a letter to Dr. Whalley. "I should suppose she has a very good fortune, and I should be vastly obliged if she would go and live very comfortably upon it ... let her retire as soon as she pleases!" At this time, when her second benefit brought her nearly £700, her ideas of supreme bliss were limited to a cottage in the country, and a capital of £10,000. Her success brought her many an enemy, the most virulent and unmanly of whom was an anonymous paragraph-writer in the newspapers, who slandered her daily, and for a brief moment excited against her the ill will of the public. "He loaded her with opprobrium," says an anonymous contemporary, "for not alleviating the distresses of her (alleged) sister,"[58] Mrs. Curtis, a vicious woman, who, according to the quaintly circumstantial writer, "would not conform to modesty, though offered a genteel annuity on that condition." Mrs. Curtis read lectures at Dr. Graham's Temple of Health, and the wayward woman attempted to poison herself in Westminster Abbey. The enemies of Mrs. Siddons somehow connected her with both circumstances, as they subsequently did with that of old Roger Kemble applying, humbly, for relief from some charitable fund, in the hands of a banker. Probably the ex-hairdresser was proud, and may have preferred to apply for aid to a fund which he had helped to sustain than to take it from his children. The story is detailed by Genest, who seems inclined to place some faith in it!