I later asked the young woman if such interpretation did not involve work almost too arduous, since nothing is more tiring than to bring one’s ideas to the level of common minds; and she told me that though the intellectual labour was harder than in any other profession, their task was lessened by the fact that so few authors had any idea of what they really meant that the actors could substitute such phrases as lent themselves more readily to their temperament. There was another actor, with a mobile mouth and masterful manner, whom I saw practising for his thirty-third performance of a part, and therefore engaged in working out a thirty-third reading. I was amazed at this, which is so contrary to our own method, but was soon persuaded of its rightness. For a work of art, this actor said, did not exist apart from the observer――it was a collaboration; and as no observer was ever twice in the same mood, he could never experience the same sensation from the identical thing. One might say, to adapt the words of an old Greek sophist, “No man can go to the same play twice.” He then went on to argue very brilliantly that since the actor made the work of art, was indeed himself a piece of it, his share of the collaboration was to make it on each occasion as different as possible from the last, so as to help any observer who might come more than once to any play. (He knew several ladies who had been to see him no less than seventeen times in the same character). This also had the extra advantage of avoiding that dull monotony――for what is art without an element of surprise?――so often to be seen in our actors, who think they have achieved a final rendering, and attempt day after day to repeat a thing which can never really occur even twice. I was much satisfied at what I had seen and learnt at the Academy, but was made slightly melancholy by the thought that if ever I should return to my own time, I should find our actors and actresses much below the level of what I had come to expect from their calling. III OTHER THEATRES