who stood for the "Grecians" of the year at Thirlwall
Hall, and May was there to see. From the moment the play was decided
upon to the hour of the first rehearsal, May spoke, thought, and dreamed
of nothing save "Alcestis."

Miss Vanhansen gave her up in disgust. "The ungrateful, soft-spoken
wretch!" cried the forsaken fair one; "the hypocritical young blue-grass
Penelope Blue! she has been bluer than the blue clouds all the time she
has been imposing on me as a pining, bread-and-butter, home-sick miss
among us Titanesses and daughters of the gods. Here I am ready to
collapse with trotting her about among the few girls in St. Ambrose's
who are sensible enough not to know the Empire of the East from the
Empire of the West, and would not care which was which if they did know,
and the still wiser young men who spend the long summer days lying on
their backs in their own canoes, reading Mark Twain. Oh! she is a
brazen-faced impostor. 'Molasses!' and 'Great Scott!' are not enough to
say to her. I should like to try her with the final polite remarks of
the last chief of the Dogs' Noses."

But contemporaneously with May's being thus dropped by her first friend,
she was peremptorily claimed and appropriated by the actresses. They had
not failed to notice her interest in their enterprise, and some of the
cleverest of them had already mastered an astonishing problem.

They had been guilty of nicknaming Miss Millar "Baby," because she had
been so lachrymose and shiftless when she came to Thirlwall Hall, and
had never looked up till she was handed over to Miss Vanhansen, who had
given her "airings" and "outings" all very well for a baby, and much to
Baby's taste as it seemed, but not exactly severe study. Yet in spite of
it all, and in spite of the halting inaccuracy of the training in a
private ladies'-school, May Millar knew more by sheer instinct, as it
sounded, of Alcestis, and felt more with her and for her, than the best
of those who professed to be her interpreters.

It was therefore not with wisely repairing the breaches in her Latin and
Greek, and laying these foundations afresh, as Rose was doing with her
art under Mr. St. Foy in London, that May was engrossed. It was with
becoming a bond-slave to those ambitious players. She lent herself to
the minutest details of their attempt, coached herself in them day and
night, till she could coach everybody in turn, and figured behind backs
as universal prompter, dresser, stag