Sheila was rejoiced at this collaboration in the game. She explained: “Oh, the p’ograms didn’t arrive in time from the pwinter, and so we had a ’nouncement made before the curtain. He’s a most un’liable pwinter and I sent the usher for the p’ograms and he never came back. ’Gene was Hamlet and he was awful good. He read the silloloquy out of the book there. He reads very well. And Dorothy was his mother, the Queen, and she was awful good, too—very good, indeed, ’ceptin’ for gigglin’ in the serious parts, and after she was dead.”
Dorothy giggled and wriggled again, to show how it was done. After this interruption was quelled Sheila went on:
“Tommy Jerrems was Laertes and he was awful good. The duel with ’Gene was terrible. I’m afraid one of your umbrellas was bent—the poisoned one. Tommy didn’t want to die and I had to hit him with a hassock, and then he was so long dyin’, he held up the whole paformance. But he was very good. And Cousin Clyde he was the wicked King, and he was awful good, but then, o’ course, he comes of our family, and you’d naturally expeck him to be good.”
Mrs. Vickery suppressed a gasp of protest from Dorothy, who was intolerant of self-advertisement, and said: “But you were dead, too, Sheila. Who were you?”
“Why, I was Ophelia, o’ course!”
“Oh! But I thought Ophelia died long before the rest, and was buried, and Hamlet and Laertes fought in her grave, and—”
“Oh yes, that’s the way it is in the old book. But I fixed it up so’s Ophelia only p’tended to die—or, no, I mean they thought she was dead, and they buried another lady, thinkin’ she was her—and all the while Ophelia is away in a kind of a—a—insanitarum gettin’ cured up. And she comes home in the last ack to s’prise everybody, and she enters, laughing, and says, ‘Well, caitiffs and fellow-countrymen, I’m well again!’ And she sees everybody lyin’ around dead—and then she goes mad all over again and drownds herself in the big swimmin’-pool—or I guess it’s a—a fountain—near the throne.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Vickery. “That sounds ever so much better.”
“Well,” said Sheila, shrugging her impudent little shoulders like any other jackanapes of a reviser, “as my papa says, ‘It sort of knits things together better and bolsters up the finish.’ You know it’s kind of bad to leave the leading lady out of the last ack. It makes the audience mad, you know.”
“Yes, I know! And was it you who screamed so at the end of the play?”