“God knows what it is!” said Peggy. “I have felt all through the act as if I were going to break down—as if I wanted to run away from an impending calamity. By heaven, sir, I feel as if the tragedy were real and not simulated!”
“Psha! You are but a woman, after all,” said Garrick.
“I fear that is the truth,” said she. “Good God! that woman seems to have changed places with me. She is speaking her lines as if she had been acting in London for years. She is doing what she pleases with the house.”
Garrick had to leave her to go through his great scene with the Oriana of the play, and Mrs. Woffington watched, as if spell-bound, the marvellous variety of his emotional expression, as, in the character of the Prince Orsino, he confessed to Oriana that he no longer loved her, but that he had given his heart to Francesca. She saw the gleam in the eyes of the actress of the part of the jealous woman as she denounced the perfidy of her lover, and bade him leave her presence. Then came Oriana's long soliloquy, in which she swore that the Prince should never taste the happiness which he had sought at her expense.
“I have a heart for murder, murder, murder!
My blood now surges like an angry sea,
Eager to grapple with its struggling prey,
And strangle it, as I shall strangle her,
With these hands hungering for her shapely
throat,