Jessamy and Barbara were wild with excitement. If it had not been for their mother, Phyllis's home bulletins would have been meager and delirious during these thrilling weeks, but Mrs. Wyndham kept "the stray unit of their four times one are four," as she called Phyllis, informed of the progress of the housekeeping and the revels.
Jessamy and Barbara set out dinnerless on the night of their "first appearance on any stage," as Jessamy reminded her mother it was, appetite lost in excitement.
She and Bab shared their dressing-room--what a delicious feeling of importance it gave them to know it was a dressing-room used by a real actress during the season!
Jessamy's _Miranda_ costume was most beautiful; perhaps none of the others quite equaled it in poetic beauty, though most of the other costumes were more splendid. It was sea-green and white, hung with pearls and shells and narrow ribbon made to represent seaweed. A gauzy veil, white and filmy as sea-foam, floated from her beautiful hair, which hung, half loose, half confined with pearls, about her shoulders. Little Barbara looked her best in white and gold, with devices for increasing her height, and her hair piled high on her saucy head, held tilted scornfully as became both her actual self and _Beatrice_.
Grace Hammond was _Viola_, not in doublets, but in a short skirt, with sword at side and a rakish cap set boyishly on her dark hair. _Ophelia_--come to life, as the lines explained, for she had not been drowned, but had revived when they laid her in the grave--and _Juliet_ and _Desdemona_, both happily resuscitated after the curtain had fallen on the play, and now come forth to prove it to those who loved and mourned them, _Hermione_, _Rosalind_, _Cordelia_, _Portia_, _Katherine_ the Shrew, and _Katherine_ the Queen, _Queen Constance_, _Titania_, _Hero_, and a few of the lesser known of Shakspere's lovable women, shyly opened their dressing-room doors one by one, and went to the wings to join _Ferdinand_, _Benedick_, _Romeo_, _Bassanio_, _Othello_, _Hamlet_, _Laertes_, _Orlando_, and all the other gallants in velvets, satins, laces, and ribbons, with _Malvolio_, gartered and bedizened, to lead the opening march.
The masque was but half an hour late in beginning, a wonderful feat of promptness for an amateur charitable entertainment. The curtain rose upon the pretty setting and a picturesque grouping of all the characters, which, immediately after the applause greeting it had begun to die away, broke up into a march to display the individual beauty concealed in the whole.