Her Faithful Knight — page 125: what you’re looking at

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

Her First Rehearsal. I21 and that will no doubt, stand her in lieu of both ability and experience.” “Beautiful!” repeated Mrs. Graham indignantly. “Do you really call that beauty? She looks to me as if she had been starving herself, as so many foolish young women do nowadays, in order to keep their waist small. But that can’t be her reason, for her waist is quite un- usually large even for a womah of her height. She must measure fully two inches more round the waist than my Mabel, and Mabel never tightlaces. Her slenderness,. which has been so much admired, is quite natural. I was just as slim when I was a girl, if not slimmer.” “I believe large waists are the fashion nowadays,” re- turned Mrs. Stourton-Chepe, scanning Dorothy critically through her double eyeglass. “Miss Knight is undoubt- edly very handsome, both in face and figure, but, poor girl, her attempts at acting are positively ludicrous.” After the rehearsal Marmaduke Strutt, who was en- gaged as stage manager, took Mr. Derrick aside for a short confabulation with Ernest Devine. “It won’t do, Mr. Darcy!’ he said, shaking his head oracularly. “It won’t do to try a novice in the part of Zara. The whole piece is so—well, so unusual, and so particularly risky that only the most careful and experi- enced acting can pull it through. Now, Miss Knight ap- pears to be an amiable and charming young lady, but she simply doesn’t know how to act. Zara requires an actress of experience. Why not let her change parts with Miss Graham or Mrs. Devine?” “My excellent Strutt,” returned his manager, tapping’ him affectionately on the shoulder, “in the domains of low comedy you are unequalled. I know of no one like you for sitting on a chimney-pot hat and looking at it in bland surprise, or for missing your chair and alighting on the floor, or any such time-honored incentives to Eomichbooks (S@)