gracefully efficient in whatsoever she set her hand to. To the young
lady of to-day, belike, she will seem accordingly ridiculous--seem
poor-spirited, and a pettifogger. True, she set her hand to no
grandiose tasks. She was not allowed to become a hospital nurse, for
example, or an actress. The young lady of to-day, when she hears in
herself a `vocation' for tending the sick, would willingly, without an
instant's preparation, assume responsibility for the lives of a whole
ward at St. Thomas's. This responsibility is not, however, thrust on
her. She has to submit to a long and tedious course of training before
she may do so much as smooth a pillow. The boards of the theatre are
less jealously hedged in than those of the hospital. If our young lady
have a wealthy father, and retain her schoolroom faculty for learning
poetry by heart, there is no power on earth to prevent her from making
her de'but, somewhere, as Juliet--if she be so inclined; and such is
usually her inclination. That her voice is untrained, that she cannot
scan blank-verse, that she cannot gesticulate with grace and
propriety, nor move with propriety and grace across the stage, matters
not a little bit--to our young lady. `Feeling,' she will say, `is
everything'; and, of course, she, at the age of eighteen, has more
feeling than Juliet, that `flapper,' could have had. All those other
things--those little technical tricks--`can be picked up,' or `will
come.' But no; I misrepresent our young lady. If she be conscious that
there are such tricks to be played, she despises them. When, later,
she finds the need to learn them, she still despises them. It seems to
her ridiculous that one should not speak and comport oneself as
artlessly on the stage as one does off it. The notion of speaking or
comporting oneself with conscious art in real life would seem to her
quite monstrous. It would puzzle her as much as her grandmother would
have been puzzled by the contrary notion.