Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/90

 Jane Shore did not help him. She played in a low key, with repressed intensity, in a technic that he could not handle, and when they were on the stage together the audience went to her. Even with her back to them she dominated him. She clasped her hands behind her and in his emotional passages she opened and closed them, unknown to him, and they were as expressive as the dumb mouth of a gasping fish. She killed the biggest moment of one of his most thrilling speeches by dropping her handkerchief behind her, as if from fingers paralyzed with secret emotion. A shudder of her shoulders was more eloquent than his ranting. And when it came to the scene with the child she took the stage away from him, took the house away from him, took the applause and the curtain away from him, and topped it all by receiving across the footlights an armful of roses after a pretty play of girlish shyness and hesitation—as if to say: "For me? They can't be for me! Aren't they the star's?"—until the audience had to authorize and enforce the tribute with an ovation of handclapping and gallery whistles and the pounding of imperative feet.

The hesitation was affected, of course. The roses were Tom's and she had expected them.

She was almost compelled to make a speech. She did go so far as to shake her head in a refusal to make one.