Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/64

 stage people. Far from it. Her real name is Fanny Widgen. Her father was Mathew Widgen, a Philadelphia business man, a rice importer, of Quaker descent. Her mother was the daughter of a Calvinist minister, of an old Huguenot family. And unless you blame the French blood of a great-grandmother, there is no inheritance to account for temperament, artistry, and the stage.

Jane Shore herself gives a curious explanation of the origin of her career—more curious than credible. She says that just before her birth her mother developed an unaccountable passion for the theater; and the staid Mathew, forced to humor her, took a box at every possible performance and sat stonily in the public eye, with his wife concealed behind him. The future Juliet was all but born in that box. After her birth Mathew Widgen's aversion to the stage—as one of the open gates to hell—prevailed again in his family, unopposed. And when, at the age of five, young Fanny was found standing on a chair in front of a mirror, whitening her face with flour, it was with horror that her mother cried, "I've marked her for the theater!"

That is all very dramatic. And it may be true, as far as it goes. But it omits to mention that Mrs. Widgen provided her daughter with lessons in singing and dancing and the parlor arts of water-color