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Handsome salaries are paid to the few ladies who have a well-deserved reputation as actresses in the class of character thus indicated, and there is a demand for them a demand generally supplied by superannuated leading ladies and aged soubrettes.
I must tell you, that one of my footmen has gone to that last journey from which none return: he was a tall, presuming sort of fellow, remarkable for nothing but his impertinence, and the continual scrapes he was forever getting into amongst the soubrettes. However, he met with his death in some sudden brawl.
M. Poirson did not hesitate to cancel her agreement with him. Indeed, he had been troubled with thinking how he could employ his new actress. She was not an ingénue of the ordinary type; she could not be classed among soubrettes. There were no parts suited to her in the light comedies of Scribe and his compeers, which constituted the chief repertory of the Gymnase.
Who were those women?... Rafael knew the whole city, and had never seen them. The one seated near him was doubtless the servant of the other her maid or her companion. She was dressed in black, simply but with a certain charm, like the French soubrettes he had seen in illustrated novels.
In several pages of the paper ladies with flowery and alliterative names and pseudonyms proclaimed themselves in large letters, and in smaller type the parts they were presently playing in different combinations; others gave addresses and announced that they were At Liberty, or specified the kinds of rôles they were accustomed to fill, as Leads or Heavies, Dancing Soubrettes and Boys; Leads, Emotional and Juvenile; Heavy or Juvenile or Emotional Leads.
The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes. Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semi-professional tone. The more conservative of her townspeople looked at her askance.
Peter Tappan slipped from his seat on the table and threw away his cigarette: "One thing is sure as soubrettes," he observed; "the Clearing House means to get rid of certain false prophets. The game law is off prophets in the fall. There'll be some good gunning under the laws of New Jersey."
Vaudeville, polite or otherwise, had not yet been crowded out by the ubiquitous film. The Bijou offered entertainment of the cigar-box-tramp variety, interspersed with trick bicyclists, soubrettes in slightly soiled pink, trained seals, and Family Fours with lumpy legs who tossed each other about and struck Goldbergian attitudes. Contact with these gave Terry Sheehan a semiprofessional tone.
"He's my new side partner," she said, looking at the boy, who was not in the least abashed at the bold gaze of the negligently dressed soubrettes and the chaffing comedians who sat at the tables. Everybody laughed. "What can he do?" was the general question. "Get out there and show them, young one," she said, pointing to the centre of the dining-room. The boy obeyed without timidity.
The leading lady is generally a large voluptuous person with a head like a hay-stack seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass, and some of the soubrettes are all hats and eyes and wriggling grace.
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