Devotion and dumb endurance are more characteristic, I think, of such a woman than the melodramatic suicide which touched so many of her audience to tears. If a competent musician had co-operated with the stage-manager to give us a play without words in the manner of "L' Enfant Prodigue," I should have been better pleased, for the strange "broken American" jargon and the silly monotonous song which Miss Evelyn Millard had to say and sing, though legitimate enough, were tiresomely out of harmony with the grace and beauty of her movements, her looks, her costume. An extraordinary lapse of taste was that which permitted the dying heroine to wave the star-spangled banner in her child's face. But most of all I doubt the verisimilitude of the alleged motive for self-destruction. Sometimes Madame Chrysanthème counts her money and feels rather relieved when her foreign lover sails away; sometimes she regrets him with genuine sorrow, and might conceivably put an end to her life if confronted with the alternative of an odious match. But what she would not do is what Madame Butterfly does—namely, consider that she had suffered a dishonour expiable only by death. The Western sentiment of honour is out of place in such a connection, for she had been party with open eyes to a legal, extra-marital contract, sanctioned by usage and arranged by her relations. The infidelity of her partner might wound her heart; it could not strike her conscience.
After many more or less accurate adumbrations of Japanese life on the boards of London theatres, at last, in the spring of 1900, came "The celebrated Japanese Court Company from Tōkyō," of which the leading stars, Mr. Otojiro Kawakami and Madame Sada
