he requires training to preserve the voice. She
produces it unnaturally, and in a few years the voice will be cracked
and spoilt."

"All the better, an' then she'll give up wanting to go on the stage
with it."

"Is there anything frightful in that?" I said gently. "A great many
mothers would give all they possessed to get their daughters on the
stage. It is an exploded idea to think the stage a bad place."

"A lot is always tellin' me that, an' I believed them till I went to
see for meself, and the facts was too much of a eye-opener for me.
I'll keep to me own opinions for the future. It will be three years
ago this month, Dawn prevailed upon me to go to a play there was a lot
of blow about, an' I was never so ashamed in me life. I didn't expect
much considerin' the way I was rared regardin' theayters, but it beat
all I ever see."

"What was it?"

"I don't know the name, but it was a character of a play. There was
women in it must have been forty by the figure of them, and they had
all their bosoms bare, and showed their knees in little short skirts.
They stood in rows and grinned--the hussies! They ought to have set
down an' hid theirselves for shame! I thought we must have made a
mistake and got into a fast show, but we read in the paper after that
among the audience was all the big bugs, an' they seemed to be
enjoyin' theirselves an' laughing as if it was a intellectual,
respectable entertainment. I wanted to get up an' leave, but Dawn
coaxed me an' I give in, an' thought the next might be better, but it
was worse. I give you my word for it, there was hussies there on that
stage, before respectable people's eyes, trying all they knew to make
men be bad. They was fast pure and simple, just the same as some Jim
Clay told me about once when he went to Sydney on his own. The way he
described their carryin's on was just like them actresses on the
stage, an' me a respectable married woman who's rared a family, havin'
paid to look at them! I was ashamed to hold me head up after it for a
long time. 'It's only actin', grandma,' says Dawn, but to think that
people would act things like that; no good modest woman would ever do
it, an' the Bible strictly warns us to abstain from the appearance of
evil. An' even that wasn't all; they come out an' kissed one
another--married women supposed to be kissing other men. What sort of
a example was that to be setting other men an' women? It was the
lowerin'est thing I ever see. I t