The average salaries in melodrama are L4 a week, out of which must be provided many dresses.  The “heavy lead” or “adventuress” type, generally magnificently attired, gets about L3 a week.  In London, of course, in the West End productions, dresses are provided, but the engagement is not for a definite period as it would be on a tour, and a curious difficulty arises through this arrangement, since the actress who has once been beautifully dressed has a natural and very comprehensible predilection thenceforward to continue to be so delightfully gowned.  Her own opinion as to what a dress should cost almost invariably, after a London engagement, ceases to be on a level with what her yearly income should permit.  Clothes assume a horrible importance not known in other trades, since her appearance may mean her livelihood as a worker; for do we not know of engagements which have been made when the angle of a hat has exactly coincided with the mood of the manager who is engaging his company?

So our little average actress, starting off on tour, patches and manoeuvres to have a satisfactory appearance, and is painfully self-conscious of deficiencies when the eyes of the manager, or the more well-to-do sharers of the dressing-room, appear to enquire too closely into details.  One of my first successes was a triumphant one for my sister; since an evening blouse, ingeniously concocted from a table-centre, received some long notices in the Press.

Theatrical lodgings, when one’s salary is 25s. a week, are not always the most pleasing in the town.  Rheumatic fever and other unpleasant illnesses have been contracted from damp beds, when the landlady, in her desire to live up to the degree of cleanliness expected of her, returns the sheets too quickly to the so-lately vacated bed; because, with one company leaving in the morning, and another arriving at tea-time, there are not many hours to clean out a room, and wash and iron the only pair.

The lodgings are usually extremely bad and dirty, and generally in the least attractive and most unsavoury quarters of the town.  The food is generally unappetising and cooked with very little intelligence.  There have been many cases of women finding themselves in disreputable houses; and even recommended lodgings have been found empty on arrival, the police having raided them.  I feel very strongly that the only comfortable and dignified way to meet this difficulty is to have a regular chain of clubs, on the principle of the Three Arts Club.

Recently, in the correspondence of a leading “Daily,” I read a letter in which a man wrote that actresses on tour were able to perfect themselves as wives and housekeepers.  This throws a curious side-light on the ignorance of people in general with regard to the theatre.  Actresses may, and do, become admirable workers, wives, and housekeepers; but this is rather from the hardships of their lives than from any possibility of developing a natural aptitude for housekeeping