acting, such as it
was. I had hardly entered the theatre during all those years, and my
thoughts had as seldom reverted to anything connected with my former
occupation. While losing, therefore, the few personal qualifications
(of which the principal one was youth) I ever possessed for the
younger heroines of the drama, I had gained none but age as a
representative of its weightier female personages--Lady Macbeth,
Queen Katherine, etc.

Thus, even less well fitted than when first I came out for the work
I was again undertaking, I had the additional disadvantage of being
an extremely incompetent woman of business; and having now to make
my own bargains in the market of public exhibition, I did so with
total want of knowledge and experience to guide me in my dealings
with the persons from whom I had to seek employment.

I found it difficult to obtain an engagement in London; but Mr.
Knowles, of the Manchester Theatre, very liberally offered me such
terms as I was thankful to accept; and I there made my first
appearance on my return to the stage.

Among the various changes which I had to encounter in doing so, one
that might appear trivial enough occasioned me no little annoyance.
The inevitable rouge, rendered really indispensable by the ghastly
effect of the gaslight illumination of the stage, had always been
one of its minor disagreeables to me; but I now found that, in
addition to rouged cheeks, my fair theatrical contemporaries--fair
though they might be--literally whitewashed their necks, shoulders,
arms, and hands; a practice which I found it impossible to adopt;
and in spite of my zealous friend Henry Greville's rather indignant
expostulation, to the effect that what so beautiful a woman as
Madame Grisi condescended to do, for the improvement of her natural
charms, was not to be disdained by a person so comparatively ugly, I
steadily refused to make a whited sepulchre of _that_ description of
myself, and continued to confront the public with my own skin,
looking, probably, like a gypsy, or, when in proximity with any
feminine coadjutor, like a bronze figure arm-in-arm with a
plaster-of-Paris cast.

Before, however, beginning my new existence of professional toil, I
stayed a few days at Bannisters, with Mrs. FitzHugh and my dear
friend, her daughter Emily.]