unmoved, but now and then an agonized moan
escaped her, lest even the orchestra's effort to cover up the
paint-frame's protesting cries should prove useless. Poor woman, when she
had been lowered again to terra firma and stepped off, the whole
paint-frame would give a kind of joyous upward spring. She noticed it,
and one evening looked back, and said: "Oh, you're not a bit more glad
than I am, you screaking wretch!"

I had learned to make up my face properly, to dress my hair in various
ways, and was beginning to know something about correct costuming; but as
the season was drawing to its close my heart quaked and I was sick with
fear, for I was facing, for the first time, that terror, that affliction
of the actor's life, the summer vacation.

People little dream what a period of misery that is to many stage folk.
Seeing them well dressed, laughing and talking lightly with the
acquaintances they meet on the street, one little suspects that the
gnawing pain of hunger may be busy with their stomachs--that a woman's
fainting "because of the extreme heat, you know," was really caused by
want of food. That the fresh handkerchiefs are of their own washing. That
the garments are guarded with almost inconceivable care, and are only
worn on the street, some older articles answering in their lodgings--and
that it is not vanity, but business, for a manager is not attracted by a
seedy or a shabby-looking applicant for an engagement.

Oh, the weary, weary miles the poor souls walk! with not a penny in their
pockets. They are compelled to say, "Roll on, sweet chariot!" to even the
street-car as it appears before their longing eyes.

Some people, mostly men, under these circumstances will stand and look at
the viands spread out temptingly in the restaurant windows; others,
myself among the number, will avoid such places as one would avoid a
pestilence.

We were back in Cleveland for the last of the season, and I used to
count, over and over again, my tiny savings and set them in little piles.
The wash, the board, and, dear heaven! there were six long, long weeks
of vacation, and I had only one little pile of board money to set against
the whole six. I had six little piles of wash money, and one other little
pile, the _raison d'etre_ of which I may explain by and by, if I am not
too much ashamed of the early folly.

Now I was staying at that acme of inconvenience and discomfort, a cheap
boarding-house, where, by the way, social