Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/101

 And some of that perhaps explains one thing that seems to have greatly intrigued her public. It explains why Jane Shore has never married. Her suitors, she thinks, have not been in love with her; they have been in love with Shakespeare's Juliet, or Shaw's Patricia Beauchamp, or Barrie's Grizel, or some other ideal that is not Fanny Widgen. And they bore her. She will not marry an actor. "I won't marry one," she says, "for the same reason that I won't co-star with one. There isn't room for two of our egos in one house." A manager wanted to marry her, and she explained her rejection of him by saying in a Bowery voice, "I'm not goin' to be no man's white slave." The fact is she will probably end by marrying Fritz Hoff (now Hoffman), the property-man who blacked the star's other eye for her in Atlantic City.

He has served her like an adoring watchdog ever since that first defense of her. He was her property-man and stage manager in her first success. It was his skill as a stage carpenter that made her house so deliciously picturesque and theatrical with its window-seats and diamond panes and Belasco lights and Juliet hangings. He went with her when the most famous of her managers took her, and it was about Fritz that they had their famous quarrel, I understand. I know nothing about it. All I know is that after her last performance under that management I asked her, "Well, how do you feel about it now?" And she answered, "Feel!"