Her Faithful Knight — page 148: what you’re looking at

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

144 - _Darcy’s Mother. woman. I have yet to make her acquaintance as an actress.” The first night arrived at length, a night of moist, melt- ing heat. The paint and powder rolled in pellets off the faces of the actors cooped up in the gas-laden space of their stifling dressing-rooms and became caked in raised white lines upon their upper lips. Dorothy had no notion how to “make up,” and on a first night every one was too much excited to instruct her in the art. Fortunately her skill as a painter taught her to avoid any of the startling mistakes of beginners in that direction, and she contented herself with slightly smudging the neighborhood of her beautiful eyes and disfiguring her complexion by a very. little crude red and white color. Extreme nervousness numbed her faculties and made her appear apathetic and mechanical. Unused as she was to the theatre, it yet ap- peared to her somewhat ominous that the audience never applauded anything that she said or did, and the farther she proceeded with her part the more keenly did she rea- lize its many absurdities. “Old Marmalade” gave out his lines with as great a display of rollicking unction as though they were penned by the greatest humorist of the age. The Devines, the Grahams, and even the Stourton- Chepes and Jack Wyverly threw themselves into their parts with unquestioning thoroughness, and reaped their reward in the attention and occasional applause of the hot and scanty audience. They were actors—“theirs not to reason why ; theirs but to act or die”’—but beautiful “Zara Carewe,” of the graceful movements and melodious voice, caught herself thinking again and again that the whole thing was an unreal and distasteful business, that her words were ungrammatical nonsense, and that only her dear Phyllis’ necessities justified her in attempting any- thing for which she so clearly felt herself unsuited. At the end of the play there was a half-hearted call for EOmicboo “S (S@)