THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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the student. She discussed Aristotle, and delights in the study of biology. She talks to men in the same tone that she uses in ordering her maid. And the reformer of the nineteenth century disappears.
But how quickly the change. Before our startled eyes stood the same young lady, a vision in white tulle and rosebuds. The gauntlet of reformation is thrown over, and she lets her eyes and sweet smiles bring to her feet suitors and admirers by the score. At last her heart is captured, and we are rather tired of the silly chatter between two young hearts, and rejoice when they decide to wander away into the refreshment room to cool their fevered throats with lemon ices.
It seemed but a moment when she returned to us a bride, radiantly beautiful, clothed in spotless white, her soul as pure as the pearly whiteness of her face, bidding good-by to girlish follies, and fervently praying that God would watch over her and protect the futufe which would make her wife and woman. The veil is lowered; the organ plays. She is gone.
Again and again we saw her as the tender and loving wife—as the mother watching over a precious flock of little ones. Their bright eyes and curling locks we could almost see as she busied herself among them, now scolding, now petting them, and at last, clustered around her knee in evening prayer, the grandest and most exquisite scene of all, motherhood, passed from our gaze.
To be followed in our imagination, fifty years later, by the appearance of an old lady, her face beaming with the soft, though deep-seated lines, from a life well spent in rearing and caring for her loved ones. The husband and father is dead. It is her birthday. She waits alone her children and grandchildren. Her thoughts go back to the earlier days. The Bible, her sweetest comfort now, is resting upon her knee. One by one the children come, but alas! the face of the husband and the cheery voice of a favorite boy are gone forever. But there she stands, crowned queen of many hearts. Her arms embrace grown men and women who seem as children yet. Vanished hours return, and grandmother is to that little group the most precious and lovely figure of them all.
The curtain is lowered; the strains of “Home, Sweet Home,” swell from out the shaded screen, and we knew the end had come.
I was about to congratulate the young woman who had portrayed the wonderful tour de force , when I awoke. But the dream haunted me, and at last became a practical materialization. With no idea that I could impersonate the ideal of my dream, yet I saw where I could at least give promise of a novel and refreshing entertainment. Repeating the dream to Mr. Robert Griffin Morris, a man blessed with the unique faculty of creative genius, he grasped the idea, and in a few weeks I held in my possession the manuscript of “Flirts and Matrons,” a departure somewhat from the ideal, but —
“ I wonder if ever a song was sung,
That the singer’s heart sang sweeter;
And I wonder if ever a rhyme was rung,
But the thought surpassed the metre.”
The insight that the study gave me to dramatic art I never before discovered in recitation. There are ten millions of people (it is estimated) who do not patronize the theater, and probably thrice as many who admire the dramatization of such authors whose books would not make a play. Placed in vivid impersonation with the power of a Coquelin, the grand and beautiful thoughts and words of George Eliot in the mouth of “Adam Bede” would be a dramatic monologue greater than many presumptuous plays with a long list of players and parts. Ibsen’s plays seem classic and profound when a refined impersonator portrays and suggests the wearied characters in “The Pillars of Society,” or “ Ghosts.”
It is there one gets the deeper meaning of the author’s words, which are too often sacrificed when placed in the hands of players who, for effect, dwell upon situations