In the great situation at the end of the second act, in which the Countess has to give, in the presence of the Court, a summary of the supposed story of the White Lady, her passion at once of love and hatred charges it with a force and meaning which, for the first time, rouses the suspicions of the Prince as to the reality of the supposed apparition.

In the two or three fine and dramatic speeches which the situation involved, the actress showed the same absence of knowledge and resources as before, the same powerlessness to create a personality, the same lack of all those quicker and more delicate perceptions which we include under the general term 'refinement,' and which, in the practice of any art, are the outcome of long and complex processes of education.

There, indeed, was the bald, plain fact--the whole explanation of her failure as an artist lay in her lack both of the lower and of the higher kinds of education.

It was evident that her technical training had been of the roughest.

In all technical respects, indeed, her acting had a self-taught, provincial air, which showed you that she had natural cleverness, but that her models had been of the poorest type.