And in all other respects--when it came to interpretation or creation--she was spoilt by her entire want of that inheritance from the past which is the foundation of all good work in the present.

For an actress must have one of the two kinds of knowledge: she must have either the knowledge which comes from a fine training--in itself the outcome of a long tradition--or she must have the knowledge which comes from mere living, from the accumulations of personal thought and experience.

Miss Bretherton had neither.

She had extraordinary beauty and charm, and certainly, as Kendal admitted, some original quickness.

He was not inclined to go so far as to call it 'power.' But this quickness, which would have been promising in a _debutante_ less richly endowed on the physical side, seemed to him to have no future in her.