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“Oh, Rev!” she cried one day (it is to be regretted, but that is what she always called him). “Oh, Rev, you should have been an actor!”

He looked at her queerly. “What makes you think so?”

“You’re too thrilling for a minister.” She searched about in her agile mind for fuller means of making her thought clear. “It’s like when Mother cooks rose geranium leaves in her grape jell. She says they gives it a finer flavour, but they don’t really. You can’t taste them for the grapes, so they’re just wasted when they’re so darling and perfumy and just right in the garden.” Her face was pink with earnestness.

“D’you see what I mean, Rev?”

“Yes, I think I see, Harry.”

Then she surprised him. “I’m going on the stage,” she said, “and be a great actress when I’m grown up.”

His heart gave a leap and a lurch. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I want to. And because you didn’t. It’ll be as if you had been an actor instead of a minister–only it’ll be me.”

A bewildering enough statement to any one but the one who made it and the one to whom it was made. She was trying to say that here was the law of compensation working. But she didn’t know this. She had never heard of the law of compensation.

Her gentle mother fought her decision with all the savagery of the gentle.

“You’ll have to run away, Harry,” her father said, sadly. And at twenty-two Harrietta ran. Her objective was New York. Her father did not burden her with advice. He credited her with the intelligence she possessed, but he did overlook her emotionalism, which was where he made his mistake. Just before she left he said: “Now listen, Harry. You’re a good-looking girl, and young. You’ll keep your looks for a long time. You’re not the kind of blonde who’ll get wishy-washy or fat. You’ve got quite a good deal of brunette in you. It crops out in your voice. It’ll help preserve your looks. Don’t marry the first man who asks you or the first man who says he’ll die if you don’t. You’ve got lots of time.”

That kind of advice is a good thing for the young. Two weeks later Harrietta married a man she had met on the train between Evanston and New York. His name was Lawrence Fuller, and Harrietta had gone to school with him in Evanston. She had lost track of him later. She remembered, vaguely, people had said he had gone to New York and was pretty wild. Young as she was and inexperienced, there still was something about his face that warned her. It was pathological, but she knew nothing of pathology. He talked of her and looked at her and spoke, masterfully and yet shyly, of being with her in New York. Harrietta loved the way his hair sprang away from his brow and temples in a clean line. She shoved the thought of his chin out of her mind. His hands touched her a good deal–her shoulder, her knee, her wrist–but so lightly that she couldn’t resent it even if she had wanted to. When they did this, queer little stinging flashes darted through her veins. He said he would die if she did not marry him.

They had two frightful years together and eight years apart before he died, horribly, in the sanatorium whose enormous fees she paid weekly. They had regularly swallowed her earnings at a gulp.

Naturally a life like this develops the comedy sense. You can’t play tragedy while you’re living it. Harrietta served her probation in stock, road companies, one-night stands before she achieved Broadway. In five years her deft comedy method had become distinctive; in ten it was unique. Yet success–as the stage measures it in size of following and dollars of salary–had never been hers.

Harrietta knew she wasn’t a success. She saw actresses younger, older, less adroit, lacking her charm, minus her beauty, featured, starred, heralded. Perhaps she gave her audiences credit for more intelligence than they possessed, and they, unconsciously, resented this. Perhaps if she had read the Elsie Series at eleven, instead of Dickens, she might have been willing to play in that million-dollar success called Gossip. It was offered her. The lead was one of those saccharine parts, vulgar, false, and slyly carnal. She didn’t in the least object to it on the ground of immorality, but the bad writing bothered her. There was, for example, a line in which she was supposed to beat her breast and say: “He’s my mate! He’s my man! And I’m his woman!! I love him, I tell you I–love him!”