“What dost thou know?”
“Too well what love women to men may owe,” Peggy answered firmly, saying the line with boyish confidence. Then she went on, in a confidential, man-to-man tone: “In faith, they are as true of heart as we./My father had a daughter loved a man,/As it might be, perhaps were I a woman,/I should your lordship.”
“And what’s her history?” Mr. Lane said.
Now Peggy subtly shifted the character, and when she replied, after a short pause, it was not in the manner of either the lovesick girl or the confident, manly boy. Now she spoke dreamily, a story-teller, a poet, as Viola fell into her own pretended character, half-believing in the “sister” she had created.
“A blank, my lord. She never told her love,/But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,/Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,/And with a green and yellow melancholy/She sat, like Patience on a monument,/Smiling at grief—”
She was interrupted by a round of applause from both her parents, and responded with a start, suddenly realizing that she was in a hotel room, not in the court of the Duke Orsino or even on a stage.
“But there’s more to the speech!” she said. “You shouldn’t have applauded yet!”
“Couldn’t help it, Peg,” her father said. “Besides, I’m afraid that if you work on that any more, you might ruin it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfect just the way it is. You can do the whole speech tomorrow.”
“Oh, you’re just being a loving father,” Peggy answered, in pleased confusion, but she knew that there was more to his comments and compliments than this. She remembered how, during the weeks when she first struggled to breathe life into the character of Viola, her father had read lines with her and criticized sharply every time she did something not quite true to the role. Remembering this, her pleasure now was doubled. Even so, Peggy insisted on reading the whole speech, then doing it several times over, before she would go on to her next marked reading.
Sabina, in Skin of Our Teeth, was a complete change of pace. Peggy worked on the satirical, comic, sometimes silly-sounding lines for two hours before she felt she was ready to go on. Then, two more hours went swiftly by as she developed the poetic, passionate lines of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, working on Miriamne’s death scene.