“That is what she used to be.  But I went to the shop a day or two ago to ask her to come up to my house to rehearse with the new Hamlet.  I watched her for a few moments before she noticed me.  She was Ophelia to the life.  She conversed in blank verse.  She walked about with that little queenly air you have taught her.  She was delicious, adorable.  At first she said that she could not rehearse that night, but I told her you wished it and she came like a lamb.  I often wonder if I did a wise thing in introducing them to you.  Your sort of culture-an’-refinement’ may rather upset them when the play is over and we all settle back to the humdrum.”

“You did a great kindness to me,” said he, “and the best stroke of missionary work you’ll do in a dog’s age.  I’m going to work.”

“You are not,” she laughed.

“I am.  Shamed into it by the Lady Hyacinths.”

“Then perhaps the balance will be maintained.  If you turn them against labor they will have turned you toward it.”

But Miss Masters’ fears were groundless:  the Lady Hyacinths though dedicated to a flower of spring were old and wise in social distinctions.  The story of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid would have drawn only a contemptuous “cut it out” from the lady President.  Every Hyacinth of them knew her exact place in nature’s garden—­all except Mary Conners—­now Ophelia—­and she knew herself to be a foundling with no place at all.  The lonely woman who had adopted her was now dead and Mary was quite alone in her little two-room tenement, free to dream and play Ophelia to her heart’s content and to an imaginary Hamlet who was always Burgess.  To her he was indeed, “The expectancy and rose of the fair state.”  “The glass of fashion and the mould of form.”  He was “her honoured lord”—­“her most dear lord.”  But in Monroe Street she never deceived him.  Never handed his letters over to interfering relatives.  She could quite easily go mad and tuneful when she knew that each rehearsal—­each lesson taught by him and so quickly learned by her—­brought the days when she would never see him so close that she could almost feel their emptiness.

It was well that she played to an idealized Hamlet for the real Hamlets came and went bewilderingly.  One of Burgess’s first triumphs of tact had been to pry the part away from the lady President and give it to the sturdy Secretary.  There followed two other claimants to the throne in quick succession and then the lot fell to Rebecca Einstein and stayed there.  Each change in the principal role necessitated readjustment throughout the cast and at every change the lady President was persuaded not to over exert herself.

And still Burgess in the seclusion of the homeward bound hansom railed and swore.

“I tell you, Margaret, that girl will ruin us.  All the rest are funny.  Overwhelmingly, incredibly funny!  And pathetic!  Could anything be more pathetic!  But that awful President strikes a wrong note:  Vulgarity.  Take her out of it and we’ll have a thing the like of which New York had never seen, for Ophelia is a genius or I miss my guess and all the rest are darlings.”