"I will keep this, madam, if you please, as a memento that I once had
the honour of being useful to Mrs. Siddons."

She looked at him keenly, out of her wonderful dark eyes, then
curtsied with grave dignity--"I thank you, sir," she said, and passed
on.

A few minutes after some underling of the theatre found us out and
brought us, "by Mrs. Siddons' desire," to the best places the house
could afford.

It was a glorious night. At this distance of time, when I look back
upon it my old blood leaps and burns. I repeat, it was a glorious
night!

Before the curtain rose we had time to glance about us on that scene,
to both entirely new--the inside of a theatre. Shabby and small as
the place was, it was filled with all the beau monde of Coltham,
which then, patronized by royalty, rivalled even Bath in its fashion
and folly. Such a dazzle of diamonds and spangled turbans and
Prince-of-Wales' plumes. Such an odd mingling of costume, which was
then in a transition state, the old ladies clinging tenaciously to
the stately silken petticoats and long bodices, surmounted by the
prim and decent bouffantes, while the younger belles had begun to
flaunt in the French fashions of flimsy muslins, shortwaisted--
narrow-skirted. These we had already heard Jael furiously inveighing
against: for Jael, Quakeress as she was, could not quite smother her
original propensity towards the decoration of "the flesh," and
betrayed a suppressed but profound interest in the same.