The spinster relative felt Mrs.Malaprop's mistakes in language so seriously, and took such extraordinary pains with her blunders, that they sounded more like exercises in elocution than anything else.

The unhappy lad who led the forlorn hope of the company, in the person of "Sir Anthony Absolute," expressed the age and irascibility of his character by tottering incessantly at the knees, and thumping the stage perpetually with his stick.

Slowly and clumsily, with constant interruptions and interminable mistakes, the first act dragged on, until Lucy appeared again to end it in soliloquy, with the confession of her assumed simplicity and the praise of her own cunning.
Here the stage artifice of the situation presented difficulties which Magdalen had not encountered in the first scene--and here, her total want of experience led her into more than one palpable mistake.

The stage-manager, with an eagerness which he had not shown in the case of any other member of the company, interfered immediately, and set her right.

At one point she was to pause, and take a turn on the stage--she did it.