My three brothers are at the present time starring, either in the
provinces or in America; my two elder sisters, having strutted and
fretted their hour upon the stage, are married to respectable City
men; I, Sybil Gascoigne, have acted almost as long as I can remember;
the little ones, Kate and Dick, are still at school, but when they
leave the first thing they do will be to look out for an engagement.

I do not think we were ever any of us very much in love with the
profession. We took things easily. Of course there were some parts we
liked better than others, but we played everything that came in our
way--Comedy, Farce, Melodrama. My elder sisters quitted the stage
before they had much time to distinguish themselves. They were each
in turn, on their marriage, honoured with a paragraph in the
principal dramatic papers, but no one said the stage had sustained an
irreparable loss, or that the profession was robbed of one of its
brightest ornaments.

I was following very much in my sisters' footsteps. The critics
always spoke well of me. I never got a slating in my life, but then
before the criticism was in print I could almost have repeated word
for word the phrases that would be used.

"Miss Gascoigne was painstaking and intelligent as usual."

"The part was safe in the hands of that promising young actress,
Sybil Gascoigne."

With opinions such as these I was well content. My salary was
regularly paid, I could always reckon on a good engagement, and even