The girl was wearing an absurd costume, a bright red blouse, open at the throat, a plaid skirt too short for the slender legs beneath it and a big flapping straw hat decorated with a single rose. In one hand she carried an old-fashioned carpet bag and in the other a tiny Maltese kitten. The girl had two long braids of black hair that hung below her waist, scarlet lips, a white imploring face and wistful, humorous, tender blue eyes.
Betty was growing cold to the tips of her fingers, although her face flushed until it felt almost painful. Then she overheard a queer, half-restrained sound near her and the next instant Mrs. Wharton leaned forward from her place and placed a hand on her arm and on Mollie’s.
“Yes, girls, it is Polly!” she whispered quietly, although with shining eyes. “But please, please don’t stir or do anything in the world to attract her attention. It was Polly’s own idea to surprise you like this, and yet she is dreadfully afraid that the sight of you may make her break down and forget her part. She is simply wonderful!”
Naturally this was a mother’s opinion; however, nothing that Mrs. Wharton was saying was making the slightest impression, for neither Mollie nor Betty had heard a word.
For Moira, the little Irish girl, had begun to speak and everybody on the stage was looking toward her, smiling and shrugging their shoulders, except the two daughters of the house and their fashionable mother.
Moira had asked for her aunt, Mrs. Mulholland. She was not an emigrant maid-of-all-work, as the guests presumed her to be, but a niece of the wealthy household. She had crossed the ocean alone and was expecting a welcome from her relatives.
At this point in the drama the hero came forward to the little Irish maid’s assistance. Then her aunt and cousins dared not display the anger they felt for this undesired guest. Later it was explained that Moira had been sent to New York by her old grandfather, who, fearing that he was about to die, wished the girl looked after by her relatives. Moira’s father had been the son that stayed behind in Ireland. He had been desperately poor and the grandfather was supposed to be equally so. Then, of course, followed the history of the child’s efforts to fit herself into the insincere and unkind household.
Nothing remarkable in the story of the little play, surely, but everything in the art with which Polly O’Neill acted it!
Tears and smiles, both in writing and acting: these are what the artist desires as his true recognition. And Polly seldom spoke half a dozen lines without receiving one or the other. Sometimes the smiles and tears crowded so close together that the one had not sufficient time to thrust the other away.
“I didn’t dream the child had it in her: it is genius!” Margaret Adams whispered to her companion, when the curtain had finally fallen on the second act and she had leaned back in her chair with a sigh of mingled pleasure and relief.