I flatter myself I should have made a pretty bride, and, as for Harry, even under the chilling influences of a registrar’s office he had the air of a man who knows his own mind. How often, tittering at my thoughts, have I pictured my wedding-day long before Prince Charming hove in sight! And how different it all has been to the conceits of girlhood! When he did come, he hoisted an unknown flag and bore me off like any pirate.
Then references to life in a hotel, not named, and the good-natured scrutiny of strangers “who knew us at once as a newly-married couple, though we tried to be offhand to each other.”
Later she described the beginning of housekeeping in London, “where all is so strange”; then a few phrases which sighed.
I have come to hate the word “Miss.” It is a constant reminder of the compact. Harry says it will not be long now before our marriage can be proclaimed; but meantime I always catch myself smiling graciously when a shop-walker hails me as “madam.” There is a recognition in the word! “Miss” is only a trifle less endurable than the “my dear” of the theater, which I heard to-day for the first time.
After some days there was a darker mood:
It has given me a shock to find myself described as “domesticated.” I came home to an empty house, after to-day’s rehearsal, tired and a bit peevish, perhaps. It is so slow, this novitiate. Harry says that his influence will quickly bring me to the front, that I must have patience, that the theatrical world is so compact, yet so split up into cliques, that, were our relationship suspected, I should encounter hostility instead of the indifference which I now resent. So, in unamiable mood, I began to rate my charlady about the dust which gives its brown tone to London interiors. Thinking that a display of energy might prove a tonic, I cleared out the dining-room and made things shine. My help raised her eyebrows and a duster in astonishment. “Lor’, miss,” she said, “you are domesticated! You must have had a good mother?” A good mother! She didn’t know how that word felt.
How odiously some of the men speak, gaze. If a woman is attractive, they ogle her; if she is passée, she is less than nothing. Men did not talk and leer in that way at R. Did they think so? I cannot say. Even Harry laughed when I lost my temper in describing the impudence of a young fop who had bought his way into the chorus. “You must get used to that sort of thing in town!” he said. Then: “Bear with it a little while, sweetheart. Soon the pretense will be ended, and I shall be only too happy if you have lost the glamour of the footlights by that time. It was no wish of mine that you should become an actress.” That is quite, quite true. But I wish now—no, I don’t. I am silly and miserable. Please, diary, don’t be angry if I weep over you, and if I write foolish things.
Then, some four months after marriage: