"The Play's the Thing"
IT was several months after we published (and suppressed) our paper, The Voice of Truth, before we began to write our play. One reason was that we were tired, and another was that Sister Irmingarde always looked so worried when she saw us with a pen in our innocent hands that it interfered dreadfully with our plots. Mabel Blossom said one day that every time Sister Irmingarde met her and a virgin sheet of paper in the same room she turned pale and asked anxiously what Mabel was going to do. And it was just the same with the rest of us. Of course no literary talent could develop in an atmosphere like that, and I pointed this out to Sister Irmingarde very politely. But she said it was the "consensus of opinion" among the faculty that it would be well indeed if the literary talent at St. Catharine's lay dormant for a while. After that there didn't seem anything left for me to say. I just brooded and brooded, as artists always do when they are not appreciated; and so did Mabel Blossom and Maudie Joyce. But finally we remembered about Milton and Pope and how publishers refused Vanity Fair, and we felt better. For, after all, one failure should not destroy a whole life—or several whole lives; and, as Maudie pointed out, because we couldn't publish a paper was no sign we couldn't write a play. For a while, though, sad memories of The Voice of Truth seemed to prevent our thinking of new things; but the delay was not serious, for of course our talents were really ripening the whole time.
Our brains are very active, as I have explained before, and pretty soon we got restless. All we had been doing was to learn our lessons and recite them and practise doing up our hair new ways; and these occupations, while praiseworthy, do not long satisfy the souls of girls of fourteen with mature minds and ardent natures like ours. One night Maudie Joyce said she was sick of it—of the quiet life we were living, she meant. She said she had been thinking it all out and she had decided that minds were like bodies, and they needed to be exercised and to have something to work on, the way you give a baby things to bite when it is having teeth. I said right off that our first duty was to our minds, and if Maudie thought they were in a sluggish state, like livers, we must do something at once to stir them up, and the best thing to do was to begin our play. So we called Mabel Muriel Murphy and Mabel Blossom in (we were in Maudie's room) and told them our momentous decision. Mabel Muriel said first she thought we ought to tell Sister Edna or Sister Irmingarde, but Maudie and I had a strange feeling that if we did there wouldn't be any play or our minds wouldn't work well; so we talked Mabel Muriel out of that in a hurry. We said we would write the play first, just we four girls, and we would have only four characters in it, because then we could act it all ourselves. If it was good we would tell Sister Irmingarde about it as a pleasant surprise and let her read it; and perhaps later we would have a special performance for the Sisters and show them how the stage could be elevated and uplifted, Maudie said. So Mabel Muriel agreed (Mabel Blossom had agreed at once, because she said her mind needed something to bite on, too), and then we began to talk about the play.
First of all we agreed that instead of writing a brand-new play we would take an old one, or two or three old ones, and write them over. That would be easier, you see. Maudie said she thought it would be a good idea for each girl to write her own part—the character she was to be, you know. So I suggested that I would be Juliet and write a part like hers, where the lovely girl is only fourteen and has drunk the cup of life
