“I have to go back to the theatre.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said, quickly.
“No,” he said; “you are better alone. Take your book and go out into the fields. This room is not large enough—” and he passed out.
She understood him and, after a moment or two of reflection, got her hat, murmuring as she ran down the stairs—
“Dear old Jeffrey, I must do it for his sake.”
Doris Marlowe, as she passed down the quiet street, was as unlike the popular idea of an actress as it is possible to imagine. It is too generally supposed by the great public that an actress must necessarily be “loud” in word, dress and voice, that she must be affected on and off the stage, and that her behavior is as objectionable as her manner and attire. If the usual run of actresses are of this fashion, Doris was a singular exception to this rule. Her voice was soft and low, and as refined in its tones as the daughter of an earl; her manner was as quiet as any well-bred lady’s could be, and in her plain white dress and straw hat she looked as much like a schoolgirl as anything else, especially as she had a copy of “Romeo and Juliet” in her hand, which might have been mistaken for a French grammar.
There was in fact nothing “loud” about her; indeed, when off the stage she was rather silent and shy, and the color was as apt to come into her pale white cheeks as into those of the schoolgirl she resembled. It was only from the quiet play of the dark thick brows, and the ever changing expression of the eloquent eyes, that the keenest observer would ever have detected that Doris Marlowe was something different from the ordinary young lady whom one meets—and forgets—every day.
She passed up the street, her book held lightly in her hand, her eyes fixed dreamily on the roseate sky, and watching the din and bustle of the big manufacturing town which climbed up the hill in front of her, turned aside, and, making her way up a leafy lane, reached the fields which are as green as if Barton and its score of factory chimneys were a hundred miles away.
There was not only green grass, but clumps of trees and a running brook, and Doris, casting herself, after the fashion of her sex, on the bank by the stream, opened the book and began to study.
But after a few minutes, during which she kept her eyes upon the page with knitted brows, her thoughts began to wander, and, letting the book slip to the ground, she leaned against the trunk of a tree, and, clasping her hands around her knees, gave herself up to maiden meditation, fancy-free.