for no one but a really good woman
capable of extraordinary patience and gentleness could ever, we are
convinced, grow to feel any other sentiment for that irritating ass,
than a desire to throw bricks at him.

The stage adventuress would be a much better woman, too, if it were not
for the heroine. The adventuress makes the most complete arrangements
for being noble and self-sacrificing--that is, for going away and never
coming back, and is just about to carry them out, when the heroine, who
has a perfect genius for being in the wrong place at the right time,
comes in and spoils it all. No stage adventuress can be good while the
heroine is about. The sight of the heroine rouses every bad feeling in
her breast.

We can sympathize with her in this respect. The heroine often affects
ourselves in precisely the same way.

There is a good deal to be said in favor of the adventuress. True, she
possesses rather too much sarcasm and repartee to make things quite
agreeable round the domestic hearth, and when she has got all her
clothes on there is not much room left in the place for anybody else;
but taken on the whole she is decidedly attractive. She has grit and
go in her. She is alive. She can do something to help herself besides
calling for "George."

She has not got a stage child--if she ever had one, she has left it on
somebody else's doorstep which, presuming there was no water handy to
drown it in, seems to be about the most sensible thing she could have
done with it. She is not oppressively good.

She never wants to be "unhanded" or "let to pass."

She is not always being shocked or insulted by people telling her that
they love her; she does not seem to mind it if they do. She is not
always fainting, and crying, and sobbing, and wailing, and moaning, like
the good people in the play are.

Oh, they do have an unhappy time of it--the good people in plays! Then
she is the only person in the piece who can sit on the comic man.

We sometimes think it would be a fortunate thing--for him--if they
allowed her to marry and settle down quietly with the hero. She might
make a man of him in time.

THE SERVANT-GIRL.

There are two types of servant-girl to be met with on the stage. This is
an unusual allowance for one profession.

There is the lodging-house slavey. She has a good heart and a
smutty face and is always dressed according to the latest fashion in
scarecrows. Her leading occupation is the cleaning of b