After this comes "Queen Eleanor presenting the agreeable choice of the poisoned bowl or the dagger to the fair but frail Rosamond," represented by Blanche Going and myself; at the conclusion of which Bebe draws me aside to whisper, laughingly, how Blanche had looked the part con amore.
"I would have given very little for your chance of life had there been any reality about it," she says. "She looked—oh, she looked as—if—-" with a vicious clenching of her small fist, full of meaning.
Bebe as a laughing saucy Beatrice, and Lord Chandos as Benedick, makes a much happier tableau than their last, and eventually we wind up with a scene from the "Queen's Maries" of Whyte Melville, in which everybody generally is brought in, and where Blanche Going, as Mary Stuart, in black velvet and the inevitable cap, is the principal feature; though Bebe makes a very charming Seaton, and even I feel some admiration on beholding Marmaduke as Darnley.
With a sense of relief we come down from the stage and mingle with our audience, accepting modestly the compliments showered upon us from all sides.
Mother, who has not been inside a theatre since she was nineteen, comes up to tell us it was the prettiest sight she ever saw, and to compare us favorably with all the celebrated actors and actresses of her time.
Presently we leave the scene of our triumphs and wander into the great cool ball-room, where the decorations of the foregoing evening are still to be seen. Then somebody orders in a piano, and somebody else sits down and begins to play on it, and in another minute or two we are all dancing.
"I don't believe poor Mary Hamilton ever had your laughing eyes," says Sir Mark to me, during a pause in the dance. "She must have been a sadder, more sedate sort of person altogether. See how differently love works in different people."
"You forget she was unhappy in hers. Besides"—saucily—"how do you know love has anything to do with my eyes?"
"I don't know, of course; am only supposing—-"
"Never suppose. It is foolish, and—fatiguing. Though now we are on the subject, Monsieur Chastelar, you shall give me your definition of the words 'to love.' If we may accept Whyte Melville's opinion of you, you must be a very competent judge."