“Because of my ac-cent. You see, I was born in the West, where from the age of thirteen I toiled at this profession. I starved and cried, worked and struggled, and when success did come and I moved up East the critics always rubbed in two things—my intonation and my accent. My voice was criticised up hill and down dale. ‘A great actress, _but_——’ Then came down the hail. Mam, if my accent grated in America, among all our awful accents here, what would it have done in Britain, with your soft, beautiful voices? So I refused to go again and again. Then also when success had come I felt, ‘This public likes me, my bed and bread depend upon them; if I go to England and fail they will turn their back upon me, and I shall starve again.’ And so, Mam, regretfully I refused.” She spoke dramatically, fire shot from those large, wonderful grey eyes. I noticed she was not painted. Only the tiniest amount of make-up I have ever seen on any actress was upon her face, and then I remembered her words of warning upon the subject. In all those years she had not changed her mind. Her husband, an elderly man with white hair, stood or sat while we talked in the tiny room, and as the last curtain came down I rose to leave. “Will you give me your photograph, please?” “My dear, I haven’t one. My ugliness has caused me so much pain in life that I have almost never let a camera be turned upon me. That was my second horror: ‘She is a great actress, _but_——’ And then down came the bricks upon my looks. God made me this way, but my critics have found it a personal sin.” And she waxed warm on the subject. Her grey eyes were beautiful, however, they were so expressive; still her mouth was large, and her features heavy and bad. Her voice certainly _had_ grated upon me when I first heard it. With those who found fault with her voice I had sympathy, but none with the beauty-seekers, for expression comes before everything, and Clara Morris’s expression was wonderful. She wore her wedding ring upon her little finger, for whatever part she played through life she had never taken it off. “You see how sentimental I have been,” she laughed. In reply to a question, I replied that I had to be back in England for my boys’ holidays. Only once was I absent at holiday time, and on that occasion they were with my mother. “Happy woman!” she exclaimed. “How I have always longed for children; though such happiness never came to me. But I have an old mother who still lives, thank God; and as long as a woman has a mother she can never grow old or feel lonely.” Another remarkable figure in America, when I was over there in 1904, was Dowie the prophet, or as some on this side of the Atlantic more correctly termed him—the “Profit”; perhaps the biggest humbug that even his own vast country of adoption has produced.