The play was “As You Like It,” and for the first time Ivy was to play the part of Celia and Ralph was to make his first appearance as Orlando. Evereld wondered much what Barry Sterne thought of the performance. He was rather silent at the close of the second act and she was half afraid that he had not approved of it until she found that he had been listening to the criticisms of the people immediately behind them. “It is to me about the most amusing thing in the world to hear the comments of the public,” he said to Evereld. “Your amateur is always such a merciless critic. The less he knows the more scathing will be his fault finding. Now Macneillie’s melancholy Jaques is about as fine a piece of acting as one could wish to see, I don’t know anyone who makes so much of the character. But those wise-acres behind are carping away because they think it shows what cultured mortals they are.” “It is much the same at the Academy,” said Evereld. “The less people know about painting the more severe are their comments.” “If Lear wrote a modern version of his nonsense alphabet it ought to be ‘C was the carping cantankerous critic who cavilled and canted of Culture,’” said Barry Sterne with a laugh. “Your husband makes an excellent Orlando. I hear, too, that his Romeo is very good. I suppose you have often seen him in that part?” “Oh, yes, very often. The last time,” she smiled at the remembrance, “was in the autumn up in the north of England; I shall never forget it. Exactly opposite the theatre on a bit of waste ground, a wild beast show was being held, and it had the most noisy band imaginable. All through the Balcony scene it was thundering out ‘The man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.’ And the next night Hamlet had to soliloquise to the strains of ‘Daisy Bell.’ It was the funniest thing I ever heard!” Barry Sterne capped this story with a reminiscence of the days when he had been in a travelling company, and by the end of the evening Evereld was ready to consider him the best raconteur she had ever met. He went round afterwards to Macneillie’s dressing-room and Evereld was escorted home by Dermot and Bride, who would not however accept her invitation to supper as they were already engaged to meet Ivy at the Brintons’. The night had turned chilly. Evereld was glad to find a fire awaiting them, and she curled herself up comfortably in an armchair waiting for the return of the men-folk and finishing Black’s charming story “Judith Shakspere.” “How long they are to-night!” she exclaimed, when the last page was turned and Judith whose grave she had seen in the chancel of Stratford church only that morning, had been left happily with her lover Tom Quiney. “I shall starve if they don’t come soon. What a fire this is for toast! I will make some to pass the time.”