She seemed sitting there ready
to beat time to his applause, nod her head to it as to a childish strain
of jigging music. And this apparent preparation for a semi-comic,
semi-pitiful benediction sent his hands suddenly to his knees.
He stared at the stage. Miss Schley was looking wonderfully like Viola,
he thought, on the instant, more like than she did in real life; like
Viola gone to the bad, though become a very reticent, yet very definite,
/cocotte/. There was not much in the scene, but Miss Schley, without
apparent effort and with a profound demureness, turned the dulness of it
into something that was--not French, certainly not that--but that was
quite as outrageous as the French had been, though in a different way;
something without definite nationality, but instinct with the slyness of
acute and unscrupulous womankind. The extraordinary thing was the
marvellous resemblance this acute and unscrupulous womanhood bore to Lady
Holme's, even through all its obvious difference from hers. All her
little mannerisms of voice, look, manner and movement, were there but
turned towards commonness, even towards a naive but very self-conscious
impropriety. Had she been a public performer instead of merely a woman of
the world, the whole audience must have at once recognised the imitation.
As it was, her many friends in the house noticed it, and during the short
progress of the scene various heads were turned in her direction, various
faces glanced up at the big box in which she sat, leaning one arm on the
ledge, and looking towards Miss Schley with an expression of quiet
observation--a little indifferent--on her white face.
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