ould Fanny
Kemble do?

Around the hall doors, when they arrived, other great boys were
gathered. She was passed in quickly, to the left, through some
passages and committee rooms, to the other end of the building,
whence she would enter, in full glory, upon the platform.

She came in gracefully; a little breezy she could not help being;
it was the one movement of the universe to her at that moment, her
ten steps across the platform,--her little half bow, half droop,
before the applauding audience,--the taking up of the bouquet laid
upon her table,--her smile, with a scarcely visible inclination
again,--and the sitting down among those waves of amber that rose up
shining in the gas-light, about her, as she subsided among her
silken draperies.

She was imitative; she had learned the little outsides of her art
well; but you see the art was not high.

It was the same with her reading. She had had drill enough to make
her elocution passable; her voice was clear and sweet; she had a
natural knack, as we have seen, for speaking to the galleries. When
there was a sensational, dramatic point to make, she could make it
after her external fashion, strongly. The deep magnetism--the
electric thrill of soul-reality--these she had nothing to do with.

Yet she read some things that thrilled of themselves; the very words
of which, uttered almost anyhow, were fit to bring men to their feet
and women to tears, with sublimity and pathos. Somebody had helped
her choose effectively, and things very cunningly adaptive to
herself.

The last selection for the first part of her reading to-night was
Mrs. Browning's "Court Lady."

"Wear your fawn-colored silk when you read this," Virginia Levering
had counseled.

Her self-consciousness made the first lines telling.

"Her hair was tawny with gold,--her eyes with purple were dark;
Her cheeks pale opal burned with a red and restless spark."

Her head, bright with its golden-dusty waves and braids, leaned
forward under the light as she uttered the words; her great,
gray-blue eyes, deepening with excitement to black, lifted
themselves and looked the crowd in the face; the color mounted like
a crimson spark; she glowed all over. Yes, over; not up, nor
through; but some things catch from the outside. A flush and rustle
ran over the faces, and the benches; she felt that every eye was
upon her, lit up with an admiring eagerness, that answered to her
eagerness to be admired.

O, this w