his head in his hands,
and then he raises up and has a funny look in his eyes and plays such
music that all the crowd stops laughing and listens to him. I can dance
anything he plays, cause he makes the music talk to me. Sometimes it is
country fields and flowers and birds and running brooks, and then it
changes to dull wet nights beneath the street lamps with sad eyed girls
and bad-faced men and hungry eager people all looking for something they
have missed, and they go into cabarets like this I dance in, filled with
smoke and laughs that only come from lips not from the heart--and I
whirl and dance until I am mad from dizziness. And then the music quiets
down again and sadness comes and you know the searchers have not found
what they were looking for, and they, wander out into the dim grey light
of morning and disappear like mist upon the lake.

Oh, Kate, I love to dance! I hope I will never grow old, I want to die a
dancing.

Yours,
_Nan_.

XIX

_Dear Kate_:

I have not time to write much, but I am so glad I must tell some one,
and I know you will be glad with me. I am going to dance at the Winter
Garden at last. We are going to have our try out, and if we take, we
will sign a contract like real professionals. I can't talk it to you, I
can't say all I am feeling, but if you was here I would dance it to you.

Yours,
_Nan_.

XX

_Dear Kate_:

Just as I was a getting ready to go up to the Winter Garden for our try
out, I got a letter from Mrs. Smith saying that Billy had the diptheria.
She said, "don't come," that she would let me know all the time how he
was. Fred come to take me up and I told him I was not going, that I was
going to Billy, and he almost went crazy. He said, "Why, Nan, don't you
see you will lose your chance if you don't show up now, they will never
give it to you again." I said, "I don't care, I am going to Billy." He
nearly cried. He said, "Nan, you have been working two years trying to
get on Broadway, and if they had told you six months ago that you had a
chance to go on at the Garden, you would a said they were liars or you
would a died for joy. And now you throw it all over for a kid." I said,
I didn't care, I was a going to Billy. He talked and he talked and then
he went down and phoned for Will Henderson who come over and talked to
me. They made me feel that I was doing them a rotten trick, cause Will
wrote the music and was going to have his name on the pr