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Actorviews
“She never was better; the six years of retirement, ‘disappearance,’ have worked wonders for her ; she has at last paid herself back with rest for those long years — how many? twenty-five or thirty? — of incessant work in the theater. An hour’s calisthenics every morning before an open window — in a bathing suit! You wouldn’t,” he felicitously phrased it, “know her!” And I did not argue.
“Why have you and Miss Marlowe returned after having reaped such a thrilling farewell?” I asked, and added : “Only Kipling ever got such ‘final’ appreciations without going for good. And he did his best to.”
“I know,” said Sothern. ‘So did we — our very best. Nothing could have been more genuine than our disappearance. We not only renounced everything, we sold everything — every last stitch and stick of wardrobe and production. We had three auction sales — and the total was a beggarly six thousand dollars. For things that cost five or six hundred apiece the dealers or curio-hunters bid twenty or twenty-five dollars. The scenery we had to give away.
“But, even so,” he pursued, “I thought we had enough to live on for the balance of our days, when — when along came war and peace and made our dollars worth fifty cents. See?”
“No,” I said blindly, “I won’t see it that wray. It never has been money with you two — else you’d never have been Shakespeareans in the first place, let alone the second!”
“There was another consideration,” he smilingly admitted. “I had already made my deliberate, calculated, prepared, but — always bear in mind — sincere ‘farewell.’ I had listened to the not unfriendly ‘final’ appreciations of the public and the critics. But my wife had not. She had been taken from the stage by