The game grew exciting on both sides, actors’ and guessers’. Questions flew through the air, as hard to dodge as shrapnel. The hard-pressed actors were confronted with posers, relentlessly assailing them, backed up by a pencil, ready poised over a pad, to set down the name which a careless, too hasty answer might betray.
“It isn’t fair!” cried Florimel, driven into a corner in her Carmen costume by rapid-fire questioning of six people at once, drawn up before her. “What a lot of you to think up questions and only one of me to answer them! It’s worse than setting limed twigs for crabs!”
But Florimel was hard to entrap; her nimble wit was at its best, excited as she was by the marvellously good time she was having. Brilliant Florimel’s dark hair and eyes, and white and crimson cheeks, made her such a glowing picture in her pretty costumes that she could not help knowing what a success she made and having a good time in proportion to it.
Audrey Dallas proved helpless under fire of cross-examination, but Win’s legal training, or quick wit, or both, stood him in good stead in answering correctly, but not relevantly. He therefore made Audrey’s defencelessness a pretext for hovering near her, slyly to hint misleading answers to her. Even though Audrey was supposed to be looking toward college with an eye of single purpose, the Garden girls were sure she was not sorry that her inability to parry questions kept Win at her side. Win was quite well worth looking at in his various rôles, and laughter followed at his heels wherever he and Audrey went.
Sweet Mary was lovely as Milton’s daughter, guiding the poet’s steps. Mr. Moulton made a good foil to her fresh loveliness in his black scholar’s gown, though Mary told him that he “looked more like William Dean Howells than John Milton.”
Later in the evening Mary, as Ruth Pinch, charmed and puzzled every one by bustling through the paths, in evidence of being busy, dressed in an old-fashioned flowered muslin, with short sleeves and round neck, and carrying in her hand a yellow mixing bowl in which she stirred hard with a kitchen spoon, to represent Ruth Pinch’s famous “beefsteak pudding.”
Yet of them all, players of the game and actors in it, none was happier, prettier, more charming, none as successful in acting as Mrs. Garden. Costume succeeded costume, as rôle succeeded rôle for her, assuming a wide range of characters, each as perfectly sustained as the other. As Ariel she flitted along the paths so lightly that she conveyed the sense of flight. As the White Rabbit, whom Alice knew, she hopped along with sidewise, timid glances, for all the world like a magnified bunny. As Blue-eyed Mary, of the old song, she wistfully vended flowers, slow of step and drooping with fatigue and hunger. As the Marchioness she flaunted herself pertly in rags and with a smutty face, carrying her cribbage board, ready for a game with Dick Swiveller. And as Little Miss Muffet she was incredibly childlike and lovely in a Kate Greenaway costume, carrying her bowl and spoon on her way to look for a tuffet to sit on to eat “her curds and whey,” and murmuring a little song under her breath, like a rhythmic chant of a happy child.