"What's the matter with you, Sally?" I asked.
"I 'aven't 'ad a morsel to heat all day, dear, and I can't 'eat my
iron."
"Eat your iron, Sally! What _do_ you mean?"
"'Ow am I to iron all this, dear?" wailed Sally, picking up my Nance
Oldfield apron and a few other trifles. "It won't get 'ot."
Until then I really thought that Sally was being sardonic about an iron
as a substitute for victuals!
When she first began to dress me, I was very thin, so thin that it was
really a grief to me. Sally would comfort me in my thin days by the
terse compliment:
"Beautiful and fat to-night, dear."
As the years went on and I grew fat, she made a change in the
compliment:
"Beautiful and thin to-night, dear."
Mr. Fernandez played Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet." He was a very
nervous actor, and it used to paralyze him with fright when I knelt down
in the friar's cell with my back to the audience and put safety pins in
the drapery I wore over my head to keep it in position while I said the
lines,
"Are you at leisure, holy father, now
Or shall I come to you at evening mass?"
Not long after the production of "Romeo and Juliet" I saw the
performance of a Greek play--the "Electra," I think--by some Oxford
students.
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