making every fit of the blues
so much the sadder and aggravating despondency toward despair.

"Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that _you_ wouldn't succeed,"
Spenser hastened to apologize with more or less real
kindliness. "Sperry says Brent has some good ideas about
acting. So, you'll learn something--maybe enough to enable me
to put you in a good position--if Brent gets tired and if you
still want to be independent, as you call it."

"I hope so," said Susan absently.

Spenser was no more absorbed in his career than she in hers;
only, she realized how useless it would be to try to talk it
to him--that he would not give her so much as ears in an
attitude of polite attention. If he could have looked into
her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting
her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more
amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind
and incapacity in serious matters. For, it so happened that
at the moment Susan was concentrating on a new dress. He
would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that
this new dress was for Susan in the pursuit of her scheme of
life quite as weighty a matter, quite as worthy of the most
careful attention, as was his play for him. Yet that would
have been the literal truth. Primarily man's appeal is to the
ear, woman's to the eye--the reason, by the way, why the
theater--preeminently the place to _see_--tends to be dominated
by woman.

Susan had made up her mind not only that she would rapidly
improve herself in every way, but also how she would go about
the improving. She saw that, for a woman at least, dress is
as much the prime essential as an arresting show window for a
dealer in articles that display well. She knew she was far
from the goal of which she dreamed--the position where she
would no longer be a woman primarily but a personage. Dress
would not merely increase her physical attractiveness; it
would achieve the far more important end of gaining her a
large measure of consideration. She felt that Brent, even
Brent, dealer in actualities and not to be fooled by
pretenses, would in spite of himself change his opinion of her
if she went to him dressed less like a middle class working
girl, more like the woman of the upper classes. At best,
using all the advantages she had, she felt there was small
enough chance of her holding his interest; for she could not
make herself believe that he was not deceivin