been difficult, indeed, to train her pupils to speak
and act with naturalness in roles so foreign to their experience. But
she had been much more successful than she had dared to believe, and her
own enthusiasm, her tireless drilling, above all her inspiring example
as she spoke her girls' lines for them and demonstrated to them each
telling detail of stage business, had done the work with astonishing
effect. The hardest task of all had been to find and develop a
satisfactory delineator of the difficult part of the _Tamer of the
Shrew_, but Roberta had persevered, even taking a journey of some hours
with Olivia Cartwright to have her see and study one of the greatest of
_Petruchios_ at two successive performances. She had succeeded in
stimulating Olivia to a real determination to be worthy of her teacher's
expressed belief in her, even to the mastering of her girlish tendency
to let her voice revert to a high-keyed feminine quality just when it
needed to be deepest and most stern.

The audience, as the play began, was in the customary benevolent mood of
audiences beholding amateur productions, ready to see good if possible,
anxious to show favour to all the young actors and to praise without
discrimination, aware of the proximity of proud fathers and mothers. But
this audience soon found itself genuinely interested and amused, and
with the first advent of the enchanting _Shrew_ herself became absorbed
in her personality and her fortunes quite as it might have been in those
of any talented actress of reputation.

To Ruth, sitting wide eyed and hot cheeked, her sister seemed the most
spirited and bewitching _Katherine_ ever played. Her shrewishness was
that of the wilful madcap girl who has never been crossed rather than
that of the inherently ill-tempered woman, and her every word and
gesture, her every expression of face and tone of voice, were worth
noting and watching. By no means finished work--as how should it be, in
a young teacher but few years out of school herself--it yet had an
originality and freshness of interpretation all its own, and the
applause which praised it was very spontaneous and genuine. Roberta had
been the joy of her class in college dramatics, and several of her
former classmates, in her audience to-night, gleefully told one another
that she was surpassing anything she had formerly done.

"It's simply superb, you know, don't you?--your sister's acting," said
Richard Kendrick's voice in Ruth's