Tedious! Ugly!

Thursday, February 12th., Cadogan Square, London.

Tayler and I went into "Mother Goose" pantomime at the Hippodrome last night. A melancholy interior not giving any effect of gaiety. Everything poor and second rate , except the grace of Isobel Elsom perhaps. Tedious! Tedious! Ugly! Yet I suppose this is just the sort of thing we used to admire at Drury lane in the far past. But the worst part of the affair is the drab, dull, or silly, or stupid audience - comprising many provincials. How they laughed at the feeblest jokes, and broke into uncontrollable applause before the end of the most ordinary stunts.

Isobel Elsom (1893 – 11981) was an English screen, stage and television actress. Over the course of three decades she appeared in 17 Broadway productions, beginning with The Ghost Train in 1926. Her best-known stage role was the wealthy murder victim in Ladies in Retirement (1939), a role she repeated in the 1941 film version. Her other theatre credits included The Innocents and Romeo and Juliet. Elsom made her first screen appearance during the silent film era and appeared in nearly 100 films throughout her career.

Additionally for February 12th., see 'Fascination'

Girl with voluptuous laugh, short and frequent. Half Scotch, half English. Age 24. very energetic, obstinate, and 'slow in the uptake'. Red cheeks. Good looking. Athletic. Shy - rather coy. Always the voluptuous laugh being heard, all over the hotel. A wanton laugh, most curious. Her voice also has a strange voluptuous quality. They say the Scotch women are femmes de temperament. This one must be, extremely so. And her athleticism must be an instinctive remede contre l'amour. Manners and deportment quite irreproachable, save for this eternal, rippling, startling laugh. It becomes more and more an obsession. One waits to hear it.