"You see," he murmured in Alexander's ear, as the curtain fell on
the first act, "one almost never sees a part like that done without
smartness or mawkishness. Of course, Hilda is Irish,--the Burgoynes have
been stage people for generations,--and she has the Irish voice. It's
delightful to hear it in a London theatre. That laugh, now, when she
doubles over at the hips--who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves
her hand, too. She's at her best in the second act. She's really
MacConnell's poetic motif, you see; makes the whole thing a fairy tale."
The second act opened before Philly Doyle's underground still, with
Peggy and her battered donkey come in to smuggle a load of potheen
across the bog, and to bring Philly word of what was doing in the world
without, and of what was happening along the roadsides and ditches with
the first gleam of fine weather. Alexander, annoyed by Mainhall's sighs
and exclamations, watched her with keen, half-skeptical interest. As
Mainhall had said, she was the second act; the plot and feeling alike
depended upon her lightness of foot, her lightness of touch, upon the
shrewdness and deft fancifulness that played alternately, and sometimes
together, in her mirthful brown eyes. When she began to dance, by way of
showing the gossoons what she had seen in the fairy rings at night, the
house broke into a prolonged uproar. After her dance she withdrew from
the dialogue and retreated to the ditch wall back of Philly's burrow,
where she sat singing "The Rising of the Moon" and making a wreath of
primroses for her donkey.
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