Lecount in
a character which neither of those two persons can have any possible
reason for suspecting at the outset--the character of Miss Garth.
What course am I to take under these circumstances? Having got her
secret, what am I to do with it? These are awkward considerations; I am
rather puzzled how to deal with them.
It is something more than the mere fact of her choosing to disguise
herself to forward her own private ends that causes my present
perplexity. Hundreds of girls take fancies for disguising themselves;
and hundreds of instances of it are related year after year in the
public journals. But my ex-pupil is not to be confounded for one moment
with the average adventuress of the newspapers. She is capable of
going a long way beyond the limit of dressing herself like a man, and
imitating a man's voice and manner. She has a natural gift for assuming
characters which I have never seen equaled by a woman; and she has
performed in public until she has felt her own power, and trained her
talent for disguising herself to the highest pitch. A girl who takes the
sharpest people unawares by using such a capacity as this to help
her own objects in private life, and who sharpens that capacity by a
determination to fight her way to her own purpose, which has beaten down
everything before it, up to this time--is a girl who tries an experiment
in deception, new enough and dangerous enough to lead, one way or the
other, to very serious results.
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