Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Iberoine. IS always in trouble—and don't she let you know it, too. Her life v is undeniably a 5|f- . ' .S hard one. Nothing goes right with her. We all have our troubles, but the Stage heroine never has anything else. If she only got one afternoon a week off from trouble, or had her Sundays free, it would be something. But no! misfortune stalks beside her from week's beginning to week's end. After her husband has been found guilty of murder, which is about the least thing that can ever happen to him, and her white-haired father has become a bankrupt, and has died of a broken heart, and the home of her childhood has beensold up, then her infant goes and contracts a lingering fever. She weeps a good deal during the course of her troubles, which, we suppose, is only natural enough, poor woman. But it is depressing from the point of view of the audience, and we almost wish, be- HER WHITE-HAIRED FATHER HAS BECOME A BANKRUPT. fore the evening is out, that she had not got quite so much trouble. It is over the child that she does most of her weeping. The child has a damp time of it altogether. We sometimes wonder that it never catches rheumatism. She is very good, is the Stage heroine. The comic man expresses a belief that she is a born angel. She reproves him for this with a tearful smile (it wouldn't be her smile if it wasn't tearful). "Oh no," she says (sadly of course), "I have many, many faults." We rather wish that she would show them a THE COMIC MAN EXPRESSES A BELIEF THAT SHE IS A BORN ANGEL. little more. Her excessive goodness seems somehow to pall upon us. Our only consolation, while watching her, is that there are not many good women off the stage. Life is bad enough, as it is; if there were many women, in real life, as good as...