We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Ambushing the First Actress 311
a thousand times better. Tell me something : Mother says you’re having a book published — what about it?” “Yes,” I confessed, “we’re calling it ‘Actorviews/ ” “Um ! Comprehensive ; very comprehensive.” She sipped her tea and characteristically tapped the rug with the tip of her toy-sized boot. “And how many of the old interviews you wrote in San Francisco and New York shall be in the book?”
“None.”
“Why not?”
“They don’t seem to be so well, Cousin Minnie,
the truth is they seem to be written worse than the later ones.”
“There’s my point!” she melodiously laughed. You write better now because you’re not so selfishly, stupidly, ambitiously, blunderingly, egotistically young. One writes better with years — no doubt of it.”
“And ?”
“And I suppose you want me to say acts better, too, just as the painter paints better? And I’ll say it, very stupidly, but with profound conviction : One acts better when one’s not too miserably young.”
It is rapturous fun, growing old and wise with Mrs. Fiske, to whom years bring only flavor. But I wish I could translate to this page something of the buoyancy of her body, not to mention the less translatable magnetism of her mind. . . . She is as honest as the sun, and as inscrutable as the stars. She, who has made the drama clearer and saner by her interpretation of it, is in herself ( and I sometimes think, to herself) just a little bit mysterious. She is a mystical humanist; more, she is a mystical humorist.
She knows more about the art, science and craft of play-acting than all the rest of us put together in a