“Liza doesn’t work, she conceives,” her husband once said as he stippled in my head. “For instance, sitting over the fire after dinner, I give her a poem that I think would make a song; she reads it through, drops it idly on the floor, and takes up the nearest book. I know the subject has not pleased. Another time she reads some verses, pauses, puts them on her lap, looks into the flames, waits and then reads them again. I say nothing; one word would spoil her thoughts. Again and again she reads them. She gazes into the flames or plays with her bracelet. Then, as in a dream, she gets up and fetches paper and pencil. In feverish haste she writes. I have known her write a song like that in ten minutes. I have known her go months and do nothing. Words speak to her, thoughts come, she seems at times inspired—but she can do nothing otherwise. “One day she was at a publisher’s and was running through _The Daisy Chain_. “‘Too serious,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it won’t sell.’ (He was wrong; it did.) She was angry. “‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘the public can’t only want rubbish like this.’ And she rattled off something. “‘Excellent, excellent,’ he cried; ‘just what they do want.’ That became a popular song, and fifty thousand copies were sold in no time.” “I feel almost ashamed of that song,” she said to me one day. “It is not music at all, but I am punished for my sins; it haunts me on hurdy-gurdies and from boarding-houses, when the windows are open in the summer.” Her husband is also an enthusiastic composer in a heavier line. His orchestral pieces have been played in Berlin, Russia, and other centres, but he cannot set a ballad to music, and has none of her pretty touch. He is a charming miniaturist, and once painted an interesting series of Meredith’s heroines. Next in my gallery of artists comes Mr. Percy Anderson, who is almost better known by his designs for stage costumes than as a portrait-painter, although he has done some delightful sketches of women and children. His wonderful knowledge of human attire through the world’s history is well known. He has every period at his fingers’ ends, although sometimes, as in the case of “Ulysses” for His Majesty’s Theatre, he spends days and weeks in the British Museum, hunting about to find suggestions and designs for the required costumes; in fact, he even went to Crete on one occasion to copy the mural decorations, in order to be certain he was correct in his work. Mr. Anderson is really an artist, not only in colour and form, but also in grouping and harmony. The greatest compliment he ever received was when he was invited to design the dresses for the famous “Ring” at Munich. That for an Englishman was indeed high praise from Germany. In working for the stage he often does six or seven hundred costumes for a single historical play. Each has to harmonise with its own tableaux groups, be right in detail and singly, yet form part of a scheme for the effect of the whole.