Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/81

 large voice. The rest had been done for him by good stage directors. In this case the stage director had been unable to control him, because he owned a fifty-per-cent. interest in the play—in lieu of salary—and the producer had let him have his way unchecked. As a consequence he had been so busy telling every one else how to act that no one had noticed his own performance. It was taken for granted that when the moment arrived he would open out like a magic rose.

At the dress rehearsal, when he opened out to nothing but resonant vacuity, we could not believe our ears. "I need my audience," he explained. "I'm dead without it." And we all accepted the explanation as sufficient—all except Jane Shore. She had endured much from him in the belief that, though he was an egotistical and selfish bore, he could act. After her first scene with him at the dress rehearsal she realized, with professional contempt, that "he wasn't there." Confronting him, with her back continually to the footlights, she allowed a mild withdrawal of her admiration to appear in her face, and that discouraged him.

When they came to the big scene in the third act—the love scene in which he returned her child to her—she suddenly let herself go. At sight of her little daughter coming through the door she uttered a scream of agonized joy so poignant that it stabbed into you instantly and struck tears. She