Actorviews (1923)

110 Actorviews some emotion of her sensations at reappearing after seven years before the old and the new crowd of firstnighters. “I've had, as you know, several wonderful first nights,” she said with nothing but the truth. “But this was the most wonderful of all. It seemed that every person in the theater was standing up and holding out a friendly hand to me. Really,” she went on in a desperate reach for the adequate phrase, “it made history.” The words weren’t much, but the tone was drama. “You’re as mad about the stage as you were a quarter of a century ago,” I said in wonder. “I know I am, and proud of it! When the lights go up and the overture begins to play, I’m like an old war horse smelling battle. My heart commences to pump and my nerves to sing and I feel like a girl again. There’s a line in this part of Lady Kitty that tells something of what I feel. It’s this: T shall never, never grow old!’ And I shan’t. My mother never grew old, and she lived to be eighty. She was young the day she died. I shall die — we must all do that — but never grow old. B-r-r-r! I don’t -want even to think of it. When people say to me, ‘How many years ago was it that you did this, or that?’ I say, ‘It was yesterday, only yesterday ; don’t, for heaven’s sake, speak of years !’ ” “Does it sometimes shock you when you meet a contemporary you haven’t seen for a long time?” “How’d you guess that, Ashton Stevens? Of course it does; it shocks me terribly. I always think of my old friends as they were, unaltered by time. And when I meet them and find them middle-aged, old, it’s heartbreaking; I can’t stand it. But I tell myself that the artists, the great artists of the stage, don’t