" He did _not_ write. Hours, days, weeks passed, and not a word
did we hear. "It is a break-off," said my mother consolingly. "He had
got tired of us all, and he thought this the easiest way of letting
us know. I told you there was an understanding between him and Isabel
Chisholm--any one could see that with half an eye."
I turned away shuddering.
"Terrible gales," said my father, rustling the newspaper comfortably
in his easy chair. "Great disasters among the shipping. I shouldn't
wonder if the yacht young what's-his-name went out in were come to
grief."
I grew pale, and thin, and dispirited. I knew the ladies of our
company made nasty remarks about me. One day I overheard two of them
talking.
"She never was much of an actress, and now she merely walks through
her part. They never had any feeling for art, not one of those
Gascoigne girls."
No feeling for art! What a low, mean, spiteful, wicked thing to say.
And the worst of it was that it was so true.
I resolved at once that I would do something desperate. The last
piece brought out at our theatre had been a "frost." It had dragged
along until the advertisements were able to announce "Fifteenth Night
of the Great Realistic Drama." And various scathing paragraphs from
the papers were pruned down and weeded till they seemed unstinted
praise.
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