Page:Hollyhock house; a story for girls (IA hollyhockhousest00tagg).pdf/177

Rh Her audience laughed till they were weak; or quivered, sharing her danger; or were saddened by her long-dried tears. The gifted little lady herself was in high spirits, reliving her triumphs, seeing again, repeated in this young audience in her American library, the effects she had produced on her mixed audiences in the English halls, theatres, and drawing-rooms. Her voice was gone, but she hummed for them some of her songs, producing by her perfect phrasing, with the words, considerable of the effect her singing had made. She recited for them, and the girls could not contain half their rapture. Her own three girls were entranced. Jane was wrought up to a frenzy of admiring pride in her. Florimel could not repress herself and actually cheered one number, carried beyond remembrance of conventions that forbid mad applause of one’s own.

Mary broke down and actually cried at the end of a pretty bit of child pathos. She was completely overwhelmed, and a little aghast, to discover talent, the like of which her inexperience had never encountered, shut up in her own mother’s slender body. She felt, as Gladys Low had felt for her, that it was almost past bearing to have such a gifted being one’s own mother, living under the same roof.