She
was on fire with terrible suspense: would the other actors play their
parts as she intended they should?--would her complicated drama have
the ending she was hoping for?
Had she been in a more composed, matter-of-fact state of mind, this
play which she was staging would have seemed the crudest, most
impossible melodrama--a thing both too absurd and too dangerous for
her to risk. But Maggie was just then living through one of the
highest periods of her life; she cared little what happened to her.
And it is just such moods that transform and elevate what otherwise
would be absurd to the nobly serious; that changes the impossible into
the possible; just as an exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary
difference between Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the
forgotten Bowery melodramas of a generation now gone.
She had been dressed for perhaps ten nervous minutes when the bell
rang. She admitted a slight, erect, well-dressed, middle-aged man with
a lean, thin-lipped face and a cold, hard, conservative eye: a man of
the type that you see by the dozens in the better hotels of New York,
and seeing them you think, if you think of them at all, that here is
the canny president of some fair-sized bank who will not let a client
borrow a dollar beyond his established credit, or that here is the
shrewd but unobtrusive power behind some great industry of the Middle
West.
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