To the end of my partnership
with Henry Irving it was a safe "draw" both in England and America. By
this time I must have played Portia over a thousand times. During the
first run of it the severe attack made on my acting of the part in
_Blackwood's Magazine_ is worth alluding to. The suggestion that I
showed too much of a "coming-on" disposition in the Casket Scene
affected me for years, and made me self-conscious and uncomfortable. At
last I lived it down. Any suggestion of _indelicacy_ in my treatment of
a part always blighted me. Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, of the immortal
"Alice in Wonderland") once brought a little girl to see me in "Faust."
He wrote and told me that she had said (where Margaret begins to
undress): "Where is it going to stop?" and that perhaps in consideration
of the fact that it could affect a mere child disagreeably, I ought to
alter my business!
I had known dear Mr. Dodgson for years and years. He was as fond of me
as he could be of any one over the age of ten, but I was _furious_. "I
thought you only knew _nice_ children," was all the answer that I gave
him. "It would have seemed to me awful for a _child_ to see harm where
harm is; how much more when she sees it where harm is not.
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