Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/70

 had an air of easy alertness, an air of intelligence, an air of personality. Her place near the middle of the semicircle indicated that she had only a small part in the play, for the principals sat at either extremity, near the footlights, by some stage convention of precedence; and the others had arranged themselves in order of importance in the arc. (The star, of course, was not present.) She did not strike me as remarkably beautiful—until I saw her properly made up, in the glory of the pinks and ambers of the foots. But there was, as Sir Thomas More said, "nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you had wished her somewhat higher"; and greater height would have handicapped her in her beginnings on the stage, where the men are rarely tall and rarely willing to play opposite a woman who dwarfs them.

It was probably her hat that gave me the feeling she was a horsewoman; and this impression was confirmed when the reading was finished and she rose to walk about the stage with what used to be called a "lissome" carriage—a supple-waisted and firm-shouldered bearing—that obviously came from horseback-riding. I remarked her to the playwright, using some phrase about her "carriage"; and he repeated it, when he introduced me to her, as an excuse for the introduction. "Yes," she said, regarding us gravely, "it got me my start in the profession."