e that has served me all the
years since. Everything else--love, hate, dignity, passion, vulgarity,
delicacy, duplicity, all, everything can be assumed to order; but, for
myself, tears are not mechanical, they will not come at will. The heart
must be moved, and if the part has lost its power then I must turn to
some outside incident that _has_ power. It may be from a book, it may be
from real life--no matter, if only its recalling starts tears to weary
eyes.

Thus in "Alixe" it was not for my lost lover I oftenest wept such racing
tears, but for poor old _Tennessee's partner_ as he buried his worthless
dead, with his honest old heart breaking before your eyes. While in
"Camille" many and many a night her tears fell fast over the memory of a
certain mother's face as she told me of the moment when, returning from
the burial of her only child, the first snowflakes began to whirl through
the still, cold air, and she went mad with the anguish of leaving the
little tender body there in the cold and dark, and flung herself from the
moving carriage and ran, screaming, back to the small rough pile of earth
to shelter it with her own living body.

So there is my receipt for sudden tears. I being--thank heaven--a
cheerful body, and given to frequent laughter, may laugh in peace up to
the last moment, if I have only stowed away some heart-breaking incident
that I can recall at the proper moment. It seems like taking a mean
advantage of a tender heart, I know--what Bret Harte would call "playing
it low down" on it; but what else could I do? I leave it to you. What
could _you_ do to make yourself cry seven times a week, for nine or ten
months a year?

Then there was another great change in the new life. I was used to
rehearsing every day, and, lo! when once a play was on here, there
followed weeks, perhaps months, when there were no rehearsals. Mercy! I
could never afford to waste all that time; but what could I do? "One
_and_ two _and_ three _and_," I could not afford; but, oh, _if_ I could
take some French lessons, _what_ a help they would be to me in the proper
pronunciation of names upon the stage. But I did not want lessons from
some ignorant person, or someone who had a strange dialect. I have all my
life had such a horror of _unlearning_ things. I knew a real French
teacher would charge me a real "for-true" price, and my heart was
doubtful--but see how fate was good to me. There was in Tenth Street a
little daughter of a we