Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/69

 of her first four years of struggle as a chorus-girl, as a gay young widow in a musical comedy, as an ingénue in a Washington stock company, and finally as the mother of a kidnapped child in a vaudeville act. She made a hit in the last by virtue of one nerve-shattering shrill scream with which she lifted the audience from their seats when she found that her baby had been stolen. She was then engaged to take a similar part, with a similar scream, in a melodrama by an author whom I knew. It was his first accepted play. I went to hear him read it to the company, on the stage where they were to rehearse; and I was struck by the fact that in the semicircle of actors who sat around him only two seemed to listen to the play. The others listened to the speeches of their individual parts, coming forward to these with their interest, so to speak, like children to receive their presents from a Christmas tree, and examining the lines that they received invidiously, with one eye always on what the others were getting.

The two who seemed to be hearing the play as a whole were a little girl, who was evidently to take the rôle of the kidnapped child, and a young woman in a dark street gown who listened with a consistent interest, her eyes always on the reader. She wore a sort of three-cornered hat, and she sat back in her kitchen chair, one arm outstretched to rest her hand on the knob-handle of her parasol in the attitude of a cavalier with his cane. She