The little boys observed him with exasperation. The housemaids dropped their lower jaws with wonder, when she swept down the staircase; her café-au-lait silk rolling and glittering behind her, as if the breakfast for all Loweburg were pouring down the Phoenix Hotel stairs.
The President of the People's Lyceum Club heard the rustle of elegance, and met her at the stair-foot with bowing head and bended arm.
That was a beautiful, triumphant moment, in which she crossed the space between the staircase and the door, and went down over the sidewalk to the hack. What would you have? There could not have been more of it, in her mind, though all Loweburg were standing by. She was Miss Kent, going out to give her Reading. What more could Fanny Kemble do?
Around the hall doors, when they arrived, other great boys were gathered. She was passed in quickly, to the left, through some passages and committee rooms, to the other end of the building, whence she would enter, in full glory, upon the platform.
She came in gracefully; a little breezy she could not help being; it was the one movement of the universe to her at that moment, her ten steps across the platform,—her little half bow, half droop, before the applauding audience,—the taking up of the bouquet laid upon her table,—her smile, with a scarcely visible inclination again,—and the sitting down among those waves of amber that rose up shining in the gas-light, about her, as she subsided among her silken draperies.
She was imitative; she had learned the little outsides of her art well; but you see the art was not high.
It was the same with her reading. She had had drill enough to make her elocution passable; her voice was clear and sweet; she had a natural knack, as we have seen, for speaking to the galleries. When there was a sensational, dramatic point to make, she could make it after her external fashion, strongly. The deep magnetism—the electric thrill of soul-reality—these she had nothing to do with.
Yet she read some things that thrilled of themselves; the very words of which, uttered almost anyhow, were fit to bring men to their feet and women to tears, with sublimity and pathos. Somebody had helped her choose effectively, and things very cunningly adaptive to herself.
The last selection for the first part of her reading to-night was Mrs. Browning's "Court Lady."
"Wear your fawn-colored silk when you read this," Virginia Levering had counseled.