most wish before the evening
is out that she had not got quite so much trouble.

It is over the child that she does most of her weeping. The child has
a damp time of it altogether. We sometimes wonder that it never catches
rheumatism.

She is very good, is the stage heroine. The comic man expresses a belief
that she is a born angel. She reproves him for this with a tearful smile
(it wouldn't be her smile if it wasn't tearful).

"Oh, no," she says (sadly of course); "I have many, many faults."

We rather wish that she would show them a little more. Her excessive
goodness seems somehow to pall upon us. Our only consolation while
watching her is that there are not many good women off the stage. Life
is bad enough as it is; if there were many women in real life as good as
the stage heroine, it would be unbearable.

The stage heroine's only pleasure in life is to go out in a snow-storm
without an umbrella and with no bonnet on. She has a bonnet, we know
(rather a tasteful little thing); we have seen it hanging up behind the
door of her room; but when she comes out for a night stroll during a
heavy snow-storm (accompanied by thunder), she is most careful to leave
it at home. Maybe she fears the snow will spoil it, and she is a careful
girl.

She always brings her child out with her on these occasions. She seems
to think that it will freshen it up. The child does not appreciate the
snow as much as she does. He says it's cold.

One thing that must irritate the stage heroine very much on these
occasions is the way in which the snow seems to lie in wait for her
and follow her about. It is quite a fine night before she comes on the
scene: the moment she appears it begins to snow. It snows heavily all
the while she remains about, and the instant she goes it clears up again
and keeps dry for the rest of the evening.

The way the snow "goes" for that poor woman is most unfair. It always
snows much heavier in the particular spot where she is sitting than it
does anywhere else in the whole street. Why, we have sometimes seen a
heroine sitting in the midst of a blinding snow-storm while the other
side of the road was as dry as a bone. And it never seemed to occur to
her to cross over.

We have even known a more than unusually malignant snow-storm to follow
a heroine three times round the stage and then go off (R.) with her.

Of course you can't get away from a snow-storm like that! A stage
snow-storm is the kind of snow-stor