“I have looked,” he said.
“You can t make people give you a place.”
She gazed weakly at him and said:
“Well, what do you think you will do?
A hundred dollars won’t last long.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I can’t do any more than look.”
Carrie became frightened over this announcement.
She thought desperately upon the subject.
Frequently she had considered the stage as a door through which she might enter that gilded state which she had so much craved. Now, as in Chicago, it came as a last resource in distress.
Something must be done if he did not get work soon.
Perhaps she would have to go out and battle again alone.
She began to wonder how one would go about getting a place.
Her experience in Chicago proved that she had not tried the right way.
There must be people who would listen to and try you — men who would give you an opportunity.
They were talking at the breakfast table, a morning or two later, when she brought up the dramatic subject by saying that she saw that Sarah Bernhardt was coming to this country.
Hurstwood had seen it, too.
“How do people get on the stage, George?” she finally asked, innocently.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“There must be dramatic agents.”
Carrie was sipping coffee, and did not look up.
“Regular people who get you a place?”
“Yes, I think so,” he answered.
Suddenly the air with which she asked attracted his attention.
“You’re not still thinking about being an actress, are you?” he asked.
“No,” she answered, “I was just wondering.”
Without being clear, there was something in the thought which he objected to.
He did not believe any more, after three years of observation, that Carrie would ever do anything great in that line.
She seemed too simple, too yielding.
His idea of the art was that it involved something more pompous.
If she tried to get on the stage she would fall into the hands of some cheap manager and become like the rest of them.
He had a good idea of what he meant by THEM.
Carrie was pretty.
She would get along all right, but where would he be?
“I’d get that idea out of my head, if I were you.
It’s a lot more difficult than you think.”
Carrie felt this to contain, in some way, an aspersion upon her ability.
“You said I did real well in Chicago,” she rejoined.
“You did,” he answered, seeing that he was arousing opposition, “but Chicago isn’t New York, by a big jump.”
Carrie did not answer this at all.
It hurt her.
“The stage,” he went on, “is all right if you can be one of the big guns, but there’s nothing to the rest of it. It takes a long while to get up.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Carrie, slightly aroused.
In a flash, he thought he foresaw the result of this thing.
Now, when the worst of his situation was approaching, she would get on the stage in some cheap way and forsake him.
Strangely, he had not conceived well of her mental ability.
That was because he did not understand the nature of emotional greatness.
He had never learned that a person might be emotionally — instead of intellectually — great.
Avery Hall was too far away for him to look back and sharply remember.
He had lived with this woman too long.