Daily Inspiration Quote by Herbert Beerbohm Tree

A line like this only works because it’s both an instruction and a joke at the expense of the instruction-giver. “Ladies” sets a stage-manager’s register: clipped, paternal, practiced. Then “just a little more” treats “virginity” as if it were a lighting cue or a posture note, something you can dial up by degrees. The absurdity is the point. Tree is puncturing the theater’s most stubborn demand on actresses: to manufacture “purity” as a visible, marketable effect.

The subtext is a small, sharp critique of how Victorian and Edwardian culture packaged female respectability. Onstage, innocence wasn’t a private moral state; it was a look, a tone, a composure that could be coached. Tree’s phrasing exposes the hypocrisy: society policed women’s sexuality as sacred, yet the performance economy asked women to simulate it on command for paying audiences.

It also lands as a power joke. An actor-manager like Tree had authority over casting, blocking, and reputation. The faux-politeness of “if you don’t mind” reads as theatrical etiquette masking a hierarchy: the women are being shaped, judged, and corrected in real time. That tension between “we’re all professionals here” and “I decide what you should be” is what gives the line its bite.

In context, it’s the kind of rehearsal-room quip that survives because it tells an uncomfortable truth with a laugh: “virtue” is often just stage business with better PR.