me--to keek me
hard from zee back for being such a fool. I say mit my husband dat
night, 'Vill you keek me hard, if you pleas'?' Mais, he cannot, he hav'
zee gout in zee grande toe, und he can't keek vurth one sou!--und zat is
my second tr'uble!"

Behind her broad back the Colonel confessed that had she expressed such
a wish on the occasion of the mistake, he would willingly have obliged
her, as he was quite free from gout.

So any woman who goes forth to win her living as an actress will at
least be spared the contemptuous treatment bestowed on me in my short
service as an amateur lady's maid.

_CHAPTER XIII

THE BANE OF THE YOUNG ACTRESS'S LIFE_

What is the bane of a young actress's life?

Under the protection of pretty seals stamped in various tints of wax, I
find one question appearing in many slightly different forms. A large
number of writers ask, "What is the greatest difficulty a young actress
has to surmount?" In another pile of notes the question appears in this
guise, "What is the principal obstacle in the way of the young actress?"
While two motherly bodies ask, "What one thing worries an actress the
most?" After due thought I have cast them all together, boiled them
down, and reduced them to this, "What is the bane of a young actress's
life?" which question I can answer without going into training, with one
hand tied behind me, and both eyes bandaged, answer in one
word--_dress_. Ever since that far-away season when Eve, the beautiful,
inquiring, let-me-see-for-myself Eve, made fig leaves popular in Eden,
and invented the apron to fill a newly felt want, dress has been at once
the comfort and the torment of woman.

Acting is a matter of pretence, and she who can best pretend a splendid
passion, a tender love, or a murderous hate, is admittedly the finest
actress. Time was when stage wardrobe was a pretence, too. An actress
was expected to please the eye, she was expected to be historically
correct as to the shape and style of her costume; but no one expected
her queenly robes to be of silk velvet, her imperial ermine to be
anything rarer than rabbit-skin. My own earliest ermine was humbler
still, being constructed of the very democratic white canton flannel
turned wrong side out, while the ermine's characteristic little black
tails were formed by short bits of round shoe-lacing. The only advantage
I can honestly claim for this domestic ermine is its freedom from the
moths, who dearly love