Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/65

 painting and piano-playing. It overlooks the encouragement that she gave her child in the imaginative games which they enjoyed together, secretly, in the attic games that at one time included a miniature stage and elaborate costuming. It fails, in short, to understand what is quite plain in Jane Shore's recollection of her parents—namely, that her mother was a suppressed personality, kept pallid in the shadow of her husband's righteous domination and making an unconscious revolt in the person of her daughter. If she "marked" her child for the theater, she did it, I believe, as the mother of three solemn sons—and a prospective fourth—oppressed by the tight-mouthed Mathew, and turning involuntarily to the light and romance of the stage from the drab respectability of her smothered life. To understand her you have only to see Jane Shore's photographs of her mother and her father and their blank-windowed white-brick house with its black metal deer on either side of its entrance steps and the metallic-looking black pines surrounding it. Those photographs sufficiently explain why, as long as Mrs. Widgen lived, she never allowed the girl to be checked in any natural impulse or the expression of it.

It happened—as it frequently happens—that the father admired a spirit in his daughter which he would have crushed jealously in his wife. Fanny had inherited his strength of will; he was proud of it in her; and she had her way with him. In fact,