roy the common person are, to him, entirely
innocuous, since he lives on and by his own self. And, though some stage
children may become prematurely wise, in the depths of their souls, they
must preserve, fresh and lovely, the child-spirit, the secret glory
shared by all children. If they lose that they have justification of any
kind.

There was a little girl on the London stage some few years ago whom I
have always remembered with joy. I first saw her accidentally at a
Lyceum pantomime, into which I strolled after a dull evening in Fleet
Street.

The theatre was drowned in a velvet gloom. Here and there sharp lamps
stung the dusks. There was a babble of voices. The lights of the
orchestra gleamed subtly. The pit was a mist of lilac, which shifted and
ever shifted. A chimera of fetid faces swam above the gallery rail. Wave
after wave of lifeless heads rolled on either side of me.

Then there was a quick bell; the orchestra blared the chord on, and I
sat up. Something seemed about to happen. Back at the bar was a clamour
of glass and popping cork, and bashful cries of "Order, please!" The
curtain rushed back on a dark, blank stage. One perceived, dimly, a high
sombre draping, very far upstage. There was silence. Next moment, from
between the folds, stole a wee slip of a child in white, who stood,
poised like a startled fawn. Three pale spot-limes swam uncertainly from
roof and wings, drifted a moment, then picked her up, focusing her
gleaming hair and alabaster arms. I looked at the programme.

It was Marjorie Carpenter.

The conductor tapped. A tense silence; and then our ears were drenched
in the ballet music of Delibes. Over the footlights it surged, and,
racing down-stage, little Marjorie Carpenter flung herself into it,
caressing and caressed by it, shaking, as it seemed, little showers of
sound from her delighted limbs. On that high, vast stage, amid the
crashing speed of that music and the spattering fire of the side-drums,
she seemed so frail, so lost, so alone that--oh! one almost ached for
her.

But then she danced: and if she were alone at first, she was not now
alone. She seemed at a step to people the stage with little companies of
dream.

I say she danced, and I must leave it at that. She gave us more than
dance; she gave us the spirit of Childhood, bubbling with delight, so
fresh, so contagious that I could have wept for joy of it. It was a
thing of sheer lyrical loveliness, the lovelier, perhaps,