Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/93

 effects, quite unrelatedly to anything but her will to put those individual effects across." And in that respect she is certainly the creature of conditions on the modern American stage.

Her acting, I should say, is intuitional. It is not the result of any logical process of thought and study, although she pretends that it is. She acts with two lobes of her brain, one of which governs the utterance of emotion with sincere convincingness, and the other watches the audience, the stage, and her own performance with critical detachment. You will see her come off from a big scene with her lower face working hysterically and her eyes unconcerned and cold. When enthusiasm crowds into her dressing-room to congratulate her she receives it, like royalty at an audience, with a charmingly happy smile, but with a back-thought showing, if you look for it, in the attentive scrutiny of her gaze.

However, it is not her art that I am concerned with. She is a great actress, perhaps. She is certainly a fascinating character. I have done her injustice in this account of her first success if I have not indicated that, though she was incredibly crafty in her handling of the star, she was also impulsive, full of deviltry, a person of incalculable temperament. It was certainly an impulse of mischief that prompted her to start that dining-room fight, although she took such excellent advantage of the results of it. She is tricky. "Of course I'm