It was Hurstwood who, by his presence, caused her merry thoughts to flee and replaced them with sharp longings for an end of distress.
The next day she asked him about his venture.
“They’re not trying to run any cars except with police.
They don’t want anybody just now — not before next week.”
Next week came, but Carrie saw no change.
Hurstwood seemed more apathetic than ever.
He saw her off mornings to rehearsals and the like with the utmost calm. He read and read.
Several times he found himself staring at an item, but thinking of something else.
The first of these lapses that he sharply noticed concerned a hilarious party he had once attended at a driving club, of which he had been a member.
He sat, gazing downward, and gradually thought he heard the old voices and the clink of glasses.
“You’re a dandy, Hurstwood,” his friend Walker said.
He was standing again well dressed, smiling, good-natured, the recipient of encores for a good story.
All at once he looked up.
The room was so still it seemed ghostlike. He heard the clock ticking audibly and half suspected that he had been dozing.
The paper was so straight in his hands, however, and the items he had been reading so directly before him, that he rid himself of the doze idea.
Still, it seemed peculiar.
When it occurred a second time, however, it did not seem quite so strange.
Butcher and grocery man, baker and coal man — not the group with whom he was then dealing, but those who had trusted him to the limit — called.
He met them all blandly, becoming deft in excuse. At last he became bold, pretended to be out, or waved them off.
“They can’t get blood out of a turnip,” he said. “if I had it I’d pay them.”
Carrie’s little soldier friend, Miss Osborne, seeing her succeeding, had become a sort of satellite.
Little Osborne could never of herself amount to anything. She seemed to realise it in a sort of pussy-like way and instinctively concluded to cling with her soft little claws to Carrie.
“Oh, you’ll get up,” she kept telling Carrie with admiration.
“You’re so good.”
Timid as Carrie was, she was strong in capability.
The reliance of others made her feel as if she must, and when she must she dared.
Experience of the world and of necessity was in her favour.
No longer the lightest word of a man made her head dizzy.
She had learned that men could change and fail.
Flattery in its most palpable form had lost its force with her.
It required superiority — kindly superiority — to move her — the superiority of a genius like Ames.
“I don’t like the actors in our company,” she told Lola one day.
“They’re all so struck on themselves.”
“Don’t you think Mr. Barclay’s pretty nice?” inquired Lola, who had received a condescending smile or two from that quarter.
“Oh, he’s nice enough,” answered Carrie; “but he isn’t sincere.
He assumes such an air.”
Lola felt for her first hold upon Carrie in the following manner:
“Are you paying room-rent where you are?”
“Certainly,” answered Carrie.
“Why?”
“I know where I could get the loveliest room and bath, cheap.
It’s too big for me, but it would be just right for two, and the rent is only six dollars a week for both.”
“Where?” said Carrie.
“In Seventeenth Street.”
“Well, I don’t know as I’d care to change,” said Carrie, who was already turning over the three-dollar rate in her mind.
She was thinking if she had only herself to support this would leave her seventeen for herself.
Nothing came of this until after the Brooklyn adventure of Hurstwood’s and her success with the speaking part.
Then she began to feel as if she must be free.
She thought of leaving Hurstwood and thus making him act for himself, but he had developed such peculiar traits she feared he might resist any effort to throw him off.
He might hunt her out at the show and hound her in that way.