Her Faithful Knight — page 121: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Her First Rehearsal. 117 smoothness so charmed him that he experienced a pang of regret because his father’s recent death would prevent him from sending them immediately to a magazine in his own name. ' Meantime Dorothy took herself to task, as he had « ex- pected she would, over her unnecessary abruptness to- ward him. “As he seems the only person in the company inclined to be nice to me, and as he is really overpaying me ab- surdly out of pure good nature,” she told herself, “it is simply senseless of me to let myself be prejudiced against him just because he looks sheepish in the moonlight. But for this windfall in the shape of an engagement, where should I be now? Seeing my poor darling starve to death for want of food I could not buy. Why, I ought to be ready to black Mr. Derrick’s boots out of pure gratitude.” Still more reason had she on the following day to ap- preciate her manager’s benevolence toward her. Ac- cepting the engagement as she had done, suddenly and without time for reflection, solely as a means to provide Phyllis with medical skill and the requisite nursing and luxuries, it was not until Dorothy stood in cold blood upon the small, ill-lighted stage of the local theatre that the amazinzg difficulty of her undertaking flashed clearly upon her startled brain. To begin with, the part of Zara Carewe was longer than that of Juliet, and to the full as emotional. Even Dor- othy, unaccustomed as she was to dramatic compositions, realized that the part was not only intensely difficult, but also very ill-written and unnatural. The heroine of “Love’s Right,” a Venetian of high rank and matchless beauty, betrothed to an English member of Parliament, was supposed to meet at a reception, in the first act, an irresistible Irishman, addicted to blank verse quotations, (<(0) CONNICLOOKS