for her friends and relations. Friends and relations
are a trying class of people even in real life, as we all know, but
the friends and relations of the stage adventuress are a particularly
irritating lot. They never leave her; never does she get a day or an
hour off from them. Wherever she goes, there the whole tribe goes with
her.

They all go with her in a body when she calls on her young man, and it
is as much as she can do to persuade them to go into the next room even
for five minutes, and give her a chance. When she is married they come
and live with her.

They know her dreadful secret and it keeps them in comfort for years.
Knowing somebody's secret seems, on the stage, to be one of the most
profitable and least exhausting professions going.

She is fond of married life, is the adventuress, and she goes in for it
pretty extensively. She has husbands all over the globe, most of them
in prison, but they escape and turn up in the last act and spoil all
the poor girl's plans. That is so like husbands--no consideration, no
thought for their poor wives. They are not a prepossessing lot, either,
those early husbands of hers. What she could have seen in them to induce
her to marry them is indeed a mystery.

The adventuress dresses magnificently. Where she gets the money from we
never could understand, for she and her companions are always more or
less complaining of being "stone broke." Dressmakers must be a trusting
people where she comes from.

The adventuress is like the proverbial cat as regards the number of
lives she is possessed of. You never know when she is really dead. Most
people like to die once and have done with it, but the adventuress,
after once or twice trying it, seems to get quite to like it, and goes
on giving way to it, and then it grows upon her until she can't help
herself, and it becomes a sort of craving with her.

This habit of hers is, however, a very trying one for her friends and
husbands--it makes things so uncertain. Something ought to be done to
break her of it. Her husbands, on hearing that she is dead, go into
raptures and rush off and marry other people, and then just as they
are starting off on their new honeymoon up she crops again, as fresh as
paint. It is really most annoying.

For ourselves, were we the husband of a stage adventuress we should
never, after what we have seen of the species, feel quite justified in
believing her to be dead unless we had killed and buried h