The Casket of Pandora.
by Margaret Dodge.
T stood in a cobwebbed corner, in the garret of a suburban villa,—a huge zinc and wood trunk, scarred, and dented, and covered with vari-colored labels. Across its top was painted in bold, white, straggling letters the word THEATER—with the effect of a child's printing on a slate. It gave forth, when opened, an odor indescribable, half sickening,—the odor of stale "make-up," the odor theatrical of grease paint and powder that hangs around oft-used stage gowns and properties. It was, in short, a wardrobe trunk, and one that had seen hard service. To the woman who knelt there in the mellow light of the October afternoon the old trunk was more than mere zinc and wood. It was the conjurer's box, out of which memory, the magician, evoked scenes and figures many colored, ever shifting, in credible,—the scenes of that life of the theater that to-day seemed as far from her own as though it had been seven centuries instead of seven years since her first season on the stage. Ah, that first season! The lips of the kneeling woman curved into a tender scorn at the memory of it,—at the memory of that year when her other self had played milkmaids, marchionesses, what not?—in a Western repertoire company, and when the glamour of youth and boundless ambition had gilded even the dingy dressing rooms of county scat "opera houses." It was in one of the dingiest of these, she remembered,—a room where she was nightly jostled by the four other women of the company, and put off with the awkwardest corner, the poorest light, and the roughest board shelf that ever did duty for a dressing table,—it was here that her trunk had first reached her —new and shiny, and stamped with the hall mark of a well-known theatrical trunk maker. And because that special night she had, in her zeal of the
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