Note 168 — MRS. FISKE

It is of this period that Mildred Aldrich wrote, in her article on Mrs. Fiske in Famous American Actors of To-day: “It was twilight on a very cold day when I knocked at her room at Hotel Vendome. A clear voice bade me enter and in a moment I had forgotten my cold drive. It was a voice which I can never forget, and which even as I write of it comes to my ear with a strange delicious insistence. As the door closed behind me there rose from the depths of a large chair, and stood between me and the dim light from the window a slender, childish figure, in a close-fitting, dark gown. The fading light, the dark dress, threw into greater relief the pale face with its small features and deep eyes, above and around which, like a halo, was a wealth of curling red hair. I had been told that she was young; but I was not prepared for any such unique personality as hers, and I still remember the sensation of the surprise she was to me as a most delightful experience. This was not the conventional young actress to whom I have been accustomed; this slight, undeveloped figure, in its straight, girlish gown reaching only to the slender ankles. There was a pretty assumption of dignity; there was a constant cropping out in bearing, in speech, in humor and in gestures of delicious, inimitable, unconcealable youth which was most fetching and which had something so infinitely touching in it.

“I have never encountered a face more variable. At one moment I would think her beautiful. The next instant a quick turn of the head would give me a different view of the face and I would say to myself, ‘She is plain’; then she would speak, and that beautiful musical mezzo, so uncommon to American ears, and from which a Boston man once emotionally declared ‘feeling could be positively wrung, so over-saturated was it,’ would touch my heart and all else would be forgotten. Such was Minnie Maddern when I first met her on her eighteenth birthday.”