Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/92

84 "Ah, wish your daughter to act as well as that, and you'll do the handsome thing for her!"

"Well, she seems to feel what she says," Mrs. Rooth murmured, piously.

"She has some stiff things to say. I mean about her past," Basil Dash wood remarked. "The past—the dreadful past—on the stage!"

"Wait till the end, to see how she comes out. We must all be merciful!" sighed Mrs. Rooth.

"We've seen it before; you know what happens," Miriam observed to her mother.

"I've seen so many, I get them mixed."

"Yes, they're all in queer predicaments. Poor old mother—what we show you!" laughed the girl.

"Ah, it will be what you show me: something noble and wise!"

"I want to do this; it's a magnificent part," said Miriam.

"You couldn't put it on in London; they wouldn't swallow it," Basil Dashwood declared.

"Aren't there things they do there, to get over the difficulties?"

"You can't get over what she did," the young man replied.

"Yes, we must pay, we must expiate!" Mrs. Rooth moaned, as the curtain rose again.

When the second act was over our friends passed out of their baignoire into those corridors of tribulation where the bristling ouvreuse, like a pawnbroker driving a roaring trade mounts guard upon piles of heterogeneous clothing, and, gaining the top of the fine staircase which forms the state entrance