Her Faithful Knight — page 123: what you’re looking at

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

Her First Rehearsal. 119g ment. As to the rest of the company, they had stared blankly at each other and devoutly hoped that a long- suffering British public would refrain from personally at- tacking the actors. “Tt’s a lot of immoral rot,” beac Devine had confided to his wife. “But luckily we've got a contract for six weeks signed and stamped, and as nobody’s likely to come in after the first night anywhere, we may escape catcalls.” But to the author, Mr. Devine spoke otherwise.. “Tt’ll shape all right, I daresay, when the leading lady’s part’s cut down a bit,” he observed. “‘But my scenes want a lot of working up. Couldn’t you manage to let me die, too, in the last act? Like Romeo and Juliet, you know. I’ve got a very realistic Romeo death which always fetched ’em.”’ But the Hon. Darcy could not see his way to altering a line of his masterpiece. “T haven’t the slightest doubt,” he said sweetly, “that the critics will hound it off the stage, and the ignorant, pig-headed public will laugh in the wrong place. But by the end of another fifty years or so they will be clamoring for just such a play—all pure passion, poetry, and senti- ment, the hero swayed by the two great emotions a man should feel, love of a woman, ard love of his country—no vulgar plot, or trivial incidents, no more trite morality preaching, but beautiful souls working out their destiny oblivious of the world of fools outside—that is drama. And long after my play has been hissed off the boards the world will find it out.” At the first rehearsal Miss Knight greatly increased her manager’s regard for her, by being the only member of the company who did not apply to have her part altered. She was too intent upon learning her words, and trying to understand them to think of anything else, and her serious intentness and parrot-like repetition of the lines Eomichbooks (E@)