"'I thought Lady Macbeth was amazed at the _quantity_ of blood that flowed from the body of such an old man--for when you get old, you know, sir, you don't have so much blood as you used to, and I only thought that, as the "sleeping men were laced, and the knives smeared and her hands bathed with it," she might perhaps have whispered, "Yet who would have thought the old man to have so _much_ blood in him?"' I didn't mean an impertinence. Down fell the tears, for I could not talk and hold them back at the same time.
"He looked at me in dead silence for a few moments, then he said: 'Humph!' and walked away, while I rushed to the dressing-room and cried and cried, and vowed that never, never again would I talk to myself--in the theater, at all events.
"Only a short time afterward I had a proud moment when I was allowed to go on as the longest witch in the caldron scene in 'Macbeth.' Perhaps I might have come to grief over it had I not overheard the leading man say: 'That child will never speak those lines in the world!' And the leading man was six feet tall and handsome, and I was thirteen and a half years old, and to be called a child!
"I was in a secret rage, and I went over and over my lines at all hours, under all circumstances, so that nothing should be able to frighten me at night. And then, with my pasteboard crown and white sheet and petticoat, I boiled up in the caldron and gave my lines well enough for the manager to say low:
"'Good! Good!' and the leading man next night asked me to take care of his watch and chain during his combat scene, and," says Miss Morris, "my pride of bearing was unseemly, and the other girls loved me not at all, for, you see, they, too, knew he was six feet tall and handsome."
The theatrical company of which Clara Morris had become a member was what was called by the profession, a "family theater," in which the best parts are apt to be absorbed by the manager and his family, while all the poor ones are placed with strict justice where they belong. At that time, outside of the star who was being supported, men and women were engaged each for a special line of business, to which "line" they were strictly kept. However much the "family theater" was disliked by her comrades in the profession, it was indeed an ideal place for a young girl to begin her stage life in. The manager, Mr. Ellsler, was an excellent character actor; his wife, Mrs. Ellsler, was his leading woman--his daughter, Effie, though not out of school at that time, acted whenever there was a very good part that suited her. Other members of the company were mostly related in some way, and so it came about that there was not even the "pink flush of a flirtation over the first season," in fact, says Miss Morris, "during all the years I served in that old theater, no real scandal ever smirched it." She adds: "I can never be grateful enough for having come under the influence of the dear woman who watched over me that first season, Mrs. Bradshaw, the mother of Blanche, one of the most devoted actresses I ever saw, and a good woman besides. From her I learned that because one is an actress it is not necessary to be a slattern. She used to say: