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“‘I won’t forget anything,’ he answered.

“Then I wrote ‘Clara Morris’ twice, shook hands, and went out and back to Cincinnati, with an engagement in a New York theater for the coming season.”

As the tangible results of a benefit performance Clara was able to give her mother a new spring gown and bonnet and send her off to visit in Cleveland, before turning her face toward Halifax, where she had accepted a short summer engagement. At the end of it she went on to New York, engaged rooms in a quiet old-fashioned house near the theater, and telegraphed her mother to come. “She came,” says Miss Morris, “and that blessed evening found us housekeeping at last. We were settled, and happily ready to begin the new life in the great, strange city.”

From that moment, through the frenzied days of rehearsal with a new company, and with a large number of untoward incidents crowded into each day, life moved swiftly on toward the first appearance of Clara Morris on the New York stage.

With a sort of dogged despair she lived through the worry of planning how to buy costumes out of her small reserve fund. When at last all her gowns were ready, she had two dollars and thirty-eight cents left, on which she and her mother must live until her first week’s salary should be paid. Worse than that, on the last awful day before the opening night she had a sharp attack of pleurisy. A doctor was called, who, being intoxicated, treated the case wrongly. Another physician had to be summoned to undo the work of the first, and as a result Daly’s new actress was in a condition little calculated to give her confidence for such an ordeal as the coming one. She says, “I could not swallow food– I could not! As the hour drew near my mother stood over me while with tear-filled eyes I disposed of a raw beaten egg; then she forced me to drink a cup of broth, fearing a breakdown if I tried to go through five such acts as awaited me without food. I always kissed her good-by, and that night my lips were so cold and stiff with fright that they would not move. I dropped my head for one moment on her shoulder; she patted me silently with one hand and opened the door with the other. I glanced back. Mother waved her hand and called: ‘Good luck! God bless you!’ and I was on my way to my supreme test.”

A blaze of lights, a hum of voices, a brilliant throng of exquisitely gowned, bejeweled women and well-groomed men, in fact a house such as Wood’s leading lady had never before confronted! A chance for triumph or for disaster–and triumph it was! Like a rolling snowball, it grew as the play advanced. Again and again Clara Morris took a curtain call with the other actresses. Finally the stage manager said to Mr. Daly, “They want her,” and Mr. Daly answered, sharply: “I know what they want, and I know what I don’t want. Ring up again!”

He did so. But it was useless. At last Mr. Daly said, “Oh, well, ring up once more, and here, you take it yourself.”

Alone, Clara Morris stood before the brilliant throng, vibrating to the spontaneous storm of enthusiasm, and as she stood before them the audience rose as one individual, carried out of themselves by an actress whose work was as rare as it was unique–work which never for one moment descended to mere stagecraft, but in its simplest gesture was throbbing with vital human emotion.

As the curtain fell at last, while there was a busy hum of excited voices, the young person whose place on the New York stage was assured slipped into her dressing-room, scrambled into her clothes, and rushed from the theater, hurrying to carry the good news to the two who were eagerly awaiting her–her mother and her dog. “At last she saw the lighted windows that told her home was near. In a moment, through a tangle of hat, veil, and wriggling, welcoming dog, she cried: