CHAPTER IV.


HOW PLUMP AND THIN BACKS SHOULD BE CLOTHED.

She was from the middle-West, and despite the fact that she was married,
and that twenty-one half-blown blush roses had enwreathed her last
birthday cake, she had the alert, quizzical brightness of a child who
challenges everybody and everything that passes with the
countersign--"Why?" She investigated New York with unabashed interest,
and, like many another superior provincial, she freely expressed her
likes and dislikes for its traditions, show-places, and people with a
commanding and amusing audacity.

Her objections were numerous. The chief one that made a deep impression
upon her metropolitan friends was her disapproval of Sarah Bernhardt's
acting. The middle-Westerner, instead of becoming ecstatic in her
admiration, and at a loss for adjectives at the appearance of the divine
Sarah, merely perked at the great French artist for some time and then
demanded, querulously: "What's the matter with her? Why does she play
so much with her back to the audience? I don't like it."

It was a shock to the adorers of Sarah Bernhardt to hear her so
irreverently criticised. They loyally united in her defence, and sought
to squelch the revolter by loftily explaining that the actress turned
her back so often to the audience because she had such a noble, generous
nature and desired to give the other actors a chance. "She lets them
take the centre of the stage, as they say in the profession," remarked
one of the party, who prided herself upon being versed in the _argot_ of
the theatre.