ly coincided with the
mood of the manager who is engaging his company?

So our little average actress, starting off on tour, patches and
manoeuvres to have a satisfactory appearance, and is painfully
self-conscious of deficiencies when the eyes of the manager, or the
more well-to-do sharers of the dressing-room, appear to enquire too
closely into details. One of my first successes was a triumphant one
for my sister; since an evening blouse, ingeniously concocted from a
table-centre, received some long notices in the Press.

Theatrical lodgings, when one's salary is 25s. a week, are not always
the most pleasing in the town. Rheumatic fever and other unpleasant
illnesses have been contracted from damp beds, when the landlady, in
her desire to live up to the degree of cleanliness expected of her,
returns the sheets too quickly to the so-lately vacated bed; because,
with one company leaving in the morning, and another arriving at
tea-time, there are not many hours to clean out a room, and wash and
iron the only pair.

The lodgings are usually extremely bad and dirty, and generally in the
least attractive and most unsavoury quarters of the town. The food is
generally unappetising and cooked with very little intelligence.
There have been many cases of women finding themselves in disreputable
houses; and even recommended lodgings have been found empty on
arrival, the police having raided them. I feel very strongly that the
only comfortable and dignified way to meet this difficulty is to have
a regular chain of clubs, on the principle of the Three Arts Club.

Recently, in the correspondence of a leading "Daily," I read a letter
in which a man wrote that actresses on tour were able to perfect
themselves as wives and housekeepers. This throws a curious side-light
on the ignorance of people in general with regard to the theatre.
Actresses may, and do, become admirable workers, wives, and
housekeepers; but this is rather from the hardships of their lives
than from any possibility of developing a natural aptitude for
housekeeping whilst travelling week after week from town to town,
and living in rooms where the cleaning and cooking are done by the
landlady. As all domestic work is undertaken by the people who let the
rooms, the days go slowly, and there is absolutely nothing of
interest to do. If our average actress is with a successful play, her
engagement may be a long one; and she lives through the discomforts,
buoyed up by