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No tragedy-queen could have assumed more scorn. Mrs. Purling, having thrown herself into several attitudes, fell at length into a chair. "I never thought it," she said; "not from my own and only child. The serpent's tooth hath not such fangs, such power to sting, as the base ingratitude of one undutiful boy. But this fills the cup.
A tall woman, with bold black eyes, a reckless manner, and a step as firm as a man's, stalked into the room with the gait of a tragedy-queen crossing the stage. The instant her eyes fell on the French forewoman, she stopped, threw up her hands in astonishment, and exclaimed, "Finette!" "Teresa!" cried the Frenchwoman, casting her scissors on the table, and advancing a few steps.
The girl swept out of the building with tragedy-queen strides that refused to adjust themselves to the lazy, lounging pace of her mother, and carried her homeward so swiftly that she had time to bang the front gate and the front door, and her own room door and lock it, and be crying on the bed with her face in the pillow, long before her mother reached the house.
It surely could not be Arthur, who was opening and shutting it so often, moving so restlessly about, and muttering like the soliloquy of a tragedy-queen! No, it was a female voice. Also the figure half-hidden by the cupboard-door was a female figure, massive, and in flowing robes, Could it be the landlady? The door opened, and a strange man entered the room.
In her dressing-room Zelma waited for her husband. "Surely he will come now," she said. She had already put off the tragedy-queen; she was again the loving wife, yearning for one proud smile, one tender word, one straining embrace. The tempest outside the curtain still rolled in upon her, as she sat alone, drooping and sad, a spent thunder-cloud.
I would have cut off my own right hand, or burnt it to a cinder like Scaevola; sooner gone out to service played chambermaid on the boards, or the tragedy-queen of the commonest melodrama, far rather! It was all insult, injury, degradation, in whatever light I could view it, and every feeling in my nature was stung to exasperation.
"Now, lemme tell you this much right now, Mae, either you got to cut this sob stuff and get down to brass tacks and tell me what you want, or, by gad! I'll get out of here so quick it'll make your head swim. I ain't going to be let in for no tragedy-queen stuff, and the sooner you know it the better. Business! I'm a business man."
As usual, the personages who head the dramatis personæ are not the best. Bertram, though less of a nincompoop than Waverley, is not very much; Lucy is a less lively ange de candeur than Rose, and nothing else; and Julia's genteel-comedy missishness does not do much more than pair off with Flora's tragedy-queen air.
My Lady Viscountess's face was daubed with white and red up to the eyes, to which the paint gave an unearthly glare: she had a tower of lace on her head, under which was a bush of black curls borrowed curls so that no wonder little Harry Esmond was scared when he was first presented to her the kind priest acting as master of the ceremonies at that solemn introduction and he stared at her with eyes almost as great as her own, as he had stared at the player woman who acted the wicked tragedy-queen, when the players came down to Ealing Fair.
With the high-wrought, sentimental fictions of the day for her mental aliment, she grew more and more distinct and apart from the actual, prosaic existences around her; the smouldering fires of genius and ambition glowed out almost fiercely at times, through the dark dream of her eyes, startling the dullest apprehension, as she moved amid a narrow circle of country gentry, the fox-hunting guests of her uncle, the prim gossips of her aunt, the gay lovers and companions of her cousin, an unrecognized heroine, an uncrowned tragedy-queen.
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