lacks force. Or maybe rhythm.
It doesn't clink. It sort of humps in the middle. A name should flow.
Take a name like Barrymore--or Bernhardt--or Duse--you can't forget
them. Oh, I'm not comparing myself to them. Don't be funny. I just
mean--why, take Harrietta alone. It's deadly. A Thackeray miss, all
black silk mitts and white cotton stockings. Long ago, in the beginning,
I thought of shortening it. But Harriet Fuller sounds like a
school-teacher, doesn't it? And Hattie Fuller makes me think, somehow,
of a burlesque actress. You know. 'Hattie Fuller and Her Bouncing
Belles.'"

At thirty-seven Harrietta Fuller had been fifteen years on the stage.
She had little money, a small stanch following, an exquisite technique,
and her fur coat was beginning to look gnawed around the edges. People
even said maddeningly: "Harrietta Fuller? I saw her when I was a kid,
years ago. Why, she must be le'see--ten--twelve--why, she must be going
on pretty close to forty."

A worshipper would defend her. "You're crazy! I saw her last month when
she was playing in Cincinnati, and she doesn't look a day over
twenty-one. That's a cute play she's in--There and Back. Not much to it,
but she's so kind and natural. Made me think of Jen a little."

That was part of Harrietta's art--making people think of Jen. Watching
her, they would whisper: "Look! Isn't that Jen all over? The way she
sits there and looks up at him while she's sewing."

Harrietta Fuller could take lines that were stilted and shoddy and speak
them in a way to make them sound natural and distinctive and real. She
was a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a contralto note
that usually accompanies brunette colouring.

It surprised and gratified you, that tone, as does mellow wine when you
have expected cider. She could walk on to one of those stage library
sets that reek of the storehouse and the property carpenter, seat
herself, take up a book or a piece of handiwork, and instantly the
absurd room became a human, livable place. She had a knack of sitting,
not as an actress ordinarily seats herself in a drawing room--feet
carefully strained to show the high arch, body posed to form a
"line"--but easily, as a woman sits in her own house. If you saw her in
the supper scene of My Mistake, you will remember how she twisted her
feet about the rungs of the straight little chair in which she sat. Her
back was toward the audience throughout the scene, according to stage
dire