“Uncle Vanya” was to reopen in New York for two weeks at the Booth Theatre, then it was going on the road—to Boston, to Chicago, to Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia. There would be rehearsals, but we should have a good deal of time to work, she said, and would I like to come again tomorrow? It would be nearly four weeks until she left for Boston. We could make a good start.

We worked the next day, and the next, and were to have worked on Sunday, but she was ill when I arrived, and I saw her only briefly, her face flushed with fever, a light attack of “grippe.” On that day, I first met that rare woman, her mother, sweet and patient, her face like a miniature, her hands the daintiest in the world. And then, a few days later, that princess of comediennes, light-hearted Dorothy, “a bright flag flying in the breeze,” to whom all the days are good days, all music good music, to whom all clouds are lined with silver and spanned with rainbows. The likeness between the sisters, whatever it had been earlier, was hardly more now than a family suggestion that flashed faintly at long intervals. They were, in fact, about as different as it is possible for sisters to be.

Daily we rebuilt the sequence of the years—for Lillian a new occupation which she entered into with zest. As I have told earlier her “den” had a wide window that overlooked the East River—a cozy room, with small low chairs which she loved—a proper setting for her. We almost always worked there. It is associated with these pages.

Her memory of earlier happenings was vague. We relied a good deal upon Dorothy, always in childhood with her mother, who had kept her memories refreshed. To Lillian, those days of wandering had been one like another—little to look forward to, less to look back upon—mere links in a succession of one-night stands. Memory and anticipation do not prosper on that nourishment.

She typified the present. The moment it became the past, it was blurred—sometimes obliterated. Her interest in tomorrow lay chiefly in the fact that directly it was to become today. She examined it, she took it to pieces, in order that she might more substantially rebuild it. Dreams of a radiant, far-off possibility, interested her but meagerly. She had grown up without them, or had grown out of the habit of them and did not miss them any more. I think of her today as a slender figure, walking through a field of ripening grain, that parts before her, and closes behind her as she passes along. Her interest in life lies in the beautiful, exquisite things not far away, and in the welfare of those about her. She moves steadily forward, her feet firmly set. She is without envy, or malice, and totally without curiosity. She is, as I have suggested, apt to forget, but it is never safe to count on her doing so: More than once I have known her to treasure up some casual, inconsidered remark, and recall it one day to my undoing.

She was always in quiet good humor, but almost never gay. The spirit of banter, so riot in Dorothy, was in Lillian altogether lacking. I remember Dorothy saying to me: “Couldn’t you find a cigarette holder more complicated than that one?” A remark as foreign to Lillian as toe dancing.

Yet her words not infrequently took a quaint turn. Speaking of the many demands for money that came to her, she once said:

“Three hundred dollars is the amount they usually want to borrow. Sometimes they pay it back—a little of it—when it is three hundred. When it is five hundred, it is a gift—they don’t pay any of it.”

And I recall her saying: “Jazz is America’s challenge to the world.” And again: “The Guild Theatre looks like a library gone wrong.” She certainly made no effort to say such things, and when she did, apparently did not notice them at all, and would not have remembered them a moment afterward. But they were often quite unexpectedly on her tongue.

A mystic herself, she believed in mystical things—in telepathy, in foreknowledge, in visions, in Christian healing. I have already spoken of her visit to the Miracle Girl of Konnersreuth, and there was a time, chiefly on her mother’s account, when she devoted herself to Christian Science,—mind healing, and the like. I was sure she believed in the efficacy of prayer, though perhaps could not give any clear reason for it, beyond the general theory that spiritual and physical harmony might thus be restored. Certainly she was not orthodox, and I was by no means sure that she was not a pagan—a Sun-, a tree-, a flower-worshipper—that would be natural, and proper, for a dryad.

“What is your idea of God?” I asked, one day.

“Force, creative power.” A moment later, she added: “The cloud, the sunlight, that out there, the beggar on the street, myself—all a part of the great Whole—the Truth Absolute.”

“Mathematics,” I said, “is the only truth—mathematics in the larger sense, which includes art, music, science——”

But the faith of her childhood was not to be limited to equations. At luncheon, one day, we discussed the beauty of certain phrases, especially those of the King James version of the Bible. She mentioned the comfort and sheer loveliness of the words: “And underneath are the everlasting arms.”

I agreed, but pessimistically added:

“The ghastly thing about it is, that they’re not there—that this tiny pellet of a world is a part of no protecting consciousness—is drifting unheeded through space.”

“But it holds to its orbit—keeps its place in the constellation. Something sustains it.”

“A law—gravity, perhaps. Nothing that cares.”

“Oh, but there is—the arms are there—I am certain of it.”

She was interested in dreams. “I have dreamed things that happened; sometimes soon after,” she once said, and added: “I have worked out scenes in my sleep, and half-sleep, when my subconsciousness had full control. And I have many times experienced something that I am sure I had experienced before—possibly in a dream.”

“Science has accounted for that, rather prosaically, I believe.”

“Science is always accounting for things, and then by and by, it accounts for them again, in another way.”

One day, when I was rather down, she said to me:

“I know all about how futile one’s work can seem—how inconsequential. So many times last Spring I thought: ‘What am I doing this for? Dressing up and pretending to be something I am not—selling myself to these people. ‘Vanya’ was a beautiful play, and I loved it ... but to do it publicly. It was just offering oneself to be seen, for money. I never had quite that feeling, doing the pictures. The audience was not present; we were doing the picture primarily for ourselves—at least it seemed so—making a panoramic painting, on a screen.”

One day I made use of the word “dooryard.” Surprisingly, I found it new to her, but she liked the sound—the picture it conveyed. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,” I quoted from Whitman. She thought it a beautiful phrase.

In the article she had written for Oliver Sayler’s book, I read—as already she had said to me:

I do not believe in the sound film. Something very right, very true, very precious, was cut short on the verge of its ultimate and certain perfection by the intrusion of spoken dialogue and by the consequent throw-back of the cinema toward the theatre. The silent film was slowly coming into its own as an independent art which had nothing to do with the theatre, an art closely allied with music, dependent on music, an art which visualized music, creating independently to a certain point and completed thereafter by music.

But then, one day, she said:

“The silent film came to an end none too soon; it had gone as far as it could go.”

I looked out of the window, puzzled. A vessel of considerable size was passing up, toward the Sound. Noticing it, she added:

“I love a ship; any ship; I would go anywhere a ship was going. I never see one that I don’t wish to be on it.”

“I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.

“About my loving a ship?”

“No, I understand that—entirely. It is what you say of the pictures ... I can’t quite reconcile it with your article in Sayler’s book.”

“But that was theoretical. What I said just now related to existing facts. The silent pictures had gone as far as they could go in the hands they were in ... too far. In the right hands, they might have saved the world. They spoke a universal language—the only one ever invented. They could have brought all the nations together ... done away with the narrow patriotism that childishly celebrates its own country above all others, that has for its motto ‘My country, right or wrong,’ a sentiment unworthy of grown-up, enlightened people. Human beings are pretty much alike, the world over. Difference in language is the chief barrier between them. With the interchange of films, which all but the blind could read, I believe these barriers, in time would have disappeared. Now ...”

“Now ...?”

“The barriers are busily being built up again. George Arliss’s ‘Disraeli,’ a beautiful talking picture, would be practically wasted in any country but England and America. An operetta has a better chance. There is a German one on 55th Street that you should see—‘Two Hearts in Waltz Time’—clean and wholesome, with lovely music. You come away from it with a kindlier feeling for Germany. Even better were the lovely silent pictures, with such titles as were needed, in the language of each country. I know something of that, from the letters that came to me, from everywhere. Fine, friendly letters. The writers of those letters could not be our enemies.”