FROM THE LIFE
of his country and now look at the darn thing." He replied, "Stop sending silly telegrams." She wired back: "Letters did not seem to reach you. Am writing."
She wrote without replies and sent him presents without acknowledgments; and finally, when she was playing in Philadelphia, she called on him in his office and laughed him out of his resentment. He went to see her in "Romeo and Juliet," and he was scandalized by the love scenes, which she played with frank passion. "All right, Dad," she said. "There was twelve hundred dollars in the house. You know, you have to be a bit scandalous to do that amount of business in a godly town like Philadelphia. Nothing has drawn as well as that, here, since 'The Black Crook.'"
"It's a disgrace," he scolded. "A daughter of mine going on like that in public. A respectable girl!"
"Respectable!" she cried. "I'm so respectable I can't get my name in the papers without paying for it."
And indeed she was so respectable that whenever any one attacked the moral conditions on our stage, Mrs. Fiske, in replying, never failed to refer to the immaculate record and reputation of Jane Shore. With whatever abandon she played Juliet or the proposal scene in Shaw's "Satan's Advocate," she was always primly chaperoned, off the stage, by
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