“I shall count you my elder sister then, and you must tell me when you see me doing anything you don’t like, and dear Imogen will look after Trixie. Shall that be a compact? Who knows how much good you may not do me in a fortnight! Even Major Winchester himself would not give me up as incorrigible, if he heard of it.”
And under Mabella’s direction, hints, though less broad, were not wanting on Trixie’s part to Imogen herself. They were seed for which circumstances, including her own inexperience and vanity, her mother’s blind devotion and Rex Winchester’s well-intended kindness, were steadily preparing a congenial soil.
Everybody knows the atmosphere of excitement, general fuss, anxiety, and eager anticipation which seizes upon a house—a country-house especially—where “private theatricals” are in question. And to those fortunate people who have never themselves had personal experience of it, it has been too often described to need more than an allusion. It is a grand test—almost as good as a sea voyage—of temper and unselfishness. So far, perhaps, we may consider it salutary. But no doubt such a state of things has its undesirable side. To the inexperienced, especially, it brings with it a curious sense of unreality, a throwing off of one’s actual self and responsibilities which call for peculiar good-sense and self-control.
“I don’t feel as if I knew who I was,” said Imogen, looking up at Major Winchester somewhat wistfully one day, about ten days after her arrival at The Fells, when a long rehearsal had tried everybody’s patience and good-humour to the utmost. “I don’t think I am the least good at acting, and yet I feel as if I weren’t myself. I seem more than half ‘Valesca.’ Yet I shall never be able to do it the way Mr Villars tells me.”
“He is rather inexorable, certainly,” Rex agreed; “but then he wouldn’t be fit to be stage-manager if he were not. I think you will do very well, quite well enough.”
He did not add the truth—that though she was quite without dramatic power of the mildest kind, she looked the part so charmingly that no one would be inclined to be critical.
“That is faint praise,” said Imogen with one of her little pouts. “Of course I know it is a most unimportant character; still I would like to manage it decently well. How capitally Trixie and Miss Forsyth act, Major Winchester!”
He glanced at her sharply.
“Then I hope no one I care for will ever act capitally,” he said.
Imogen reddened.