Dorothy had not the faintest idea who Mrs. Siddons might be, save that she was evidently a person of distinction, but Dorothy had a child’s ferocious resentment at seeing any one else obtaining prestige under false pretenses. Sheila regarded her with a grandmotherly pity and answered:
“My name is Kemble, yes; but if you know so much, Miss Smarty-cat, you ought to know that Mrs. Siddons’s name was Miss Kemble before she married Mr. Siddons.” And now in her turn she added the deadly “Yah!”
Mrs. Vickery, in the office of peacemaker, tried to change the subject: “ ‘Sheila’—what a beautiful name!” she cried. “It’s Irish, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes, ma’am. My papa says that if you’re a great actor you have to have a streak of either Irish or Jew in you!”
“Indeed! And is your father a great actor?”
“Is he? Ask him!”
Mrs. Vickery was tormented with an intuitional suspicion that she was in the presence of a stage-child. She had never met one on the hither side of the footlights. It was uncanny to stumble upon it dressed like other children and playing among them as a child. There was a kind of weirdness about the encounter as if she had found a goblin or a pixie in the living-room, or a waif suspected of scarlet fever.
It was she and not the pixie that felt the embarrassment! The first defense of a person in confusion is usually a series of questions, and Mrs. Vickery was reduced to asking:
“What sort of plays does your father play?”