Here is quite a different impression I once made.
Long before my debut as a dancer, I was a little ingenue, and was playing the burlesque role of Jack Sheppard in the play of that name, supporting the distinguished comedian Nat Goodwin. The Editor of one of the principal papers in New York one evening brought his wife and daughter to the theatre to see me in my popular part.
The Editor’s daughter became very anxious to make my acquaintance. Her father looked me up and wrote to ask me if he might bring his daughter, a young person six years old, to call upon me.
I had succeeded so perfectly in taking a boy’s part that the little girl could not believe but that I really was one, and when she had been presented to me, she asked:
“Well, why does Jack wear girl’s clothes?”
That was another time when I did not undeceive a little admirer. To-day she is a fine young woman who has always been a faithful friend of mine.
When I was sixteen years old I made the acquaintance of a young widow who had two sons, seven and nine years old respectively. The elder fell in love with me. In spite of everything they could do to take his mind off it he became worse and worse. He fell behind in his studies and he broke away completely from his mother’s control. Things came to such a point that it was necessary to give the child a change of scene. The widow accordingly left for England with her boy. After a little time she supposed that he had ceased to think of me.
Nine years passed. In the meantime I had become a dancer and in London I happened upon the widow and her sons. Forgetting all about my little admirer’s former passion—he was now a big boy of eighteen—I engaged him as my secretary.
Some days after he said to me quietly:
“Do you remember, Miss Fuller, that when I was nine years old I told you that at eighteen I should ask you to be my wife?”