"No!" she said. "I must harden myself--and I will! Sit down again and
see me act."
"Bravo!" cried the captain. "Dash at it, my beauty--and it's done!"
She dashed at it, with a mad defiance of herself--with a raised voice,
and a glow like fever in her cheeks. All the artless, girlish charm of
the performance in happier and better days was gone. The native dramatic
capacity that was in her came, hard and bold, to the surface, stripped
of every softening allurement which had once adorned it. She would
have saddened and disappointed a man with any delicacy of feeling. She
absolutely electrified Captain Wragge. He forgot his politeness, he
forgot his long words. The essential spirit of the man's whole vagabond
life burst out of him irresistibly in his first exclamation. "Who the
devil would have thought it? She _can_ act, after all!" The instant the
words escaped his lips he recovered himself, and glided off into his
ordinary colloquial channels. Magdalen stopped him in the middle of his
first compliment. "No," she said; "I have forced the truth out of you
for once. I want no more."
"Pardon me," replied the incorrigible Wragge. "You want a little
instruction; and I am the man to give it you.
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