other and daughter, on a certain
day when Clara brought home the startling news that the company was
to be transferred to Columbus, Ohio, for the remainder of the season.
It was a great event in the young actress's life, as it meant leaving
her mother and standing alone. But as she confesses: "I felt every now
and then my grief and fright pierced through and through with a
delicious thrill of importance; I was going to be just like a
grown-up, and would decide for myself what I should wear. I might
even, if I chose to become so reckless, wear my Sunday hat to a
rehearsal, and when my cheap little trunk came, with C. M. on the end,
showing it was my very own, I stooped down and hugged it." But she
adds with honesty, "Later, when my mother, with a sad face, separated
my garments from her own, I burst into sobs of utter forlornness."

The salary of the ballet corps was now raised to $5 a week, and all
set to work to try to solve the riddle of how a girl was to pay her
board bill, her basket bill, her washing bill, and all the small
expenses of the theater--powder, paint, soap, hair-pins, etc.--to say
nothing of shoes and clothing, out of her earnings. Clara Morris and
the Bradshaws solved the problem in the only possible way by rooming
together in a large top-floor room, where they lived with a
comparative degree of comfort, and with less loneliness for Clara than
she could have felt elsewhere.

During that first season she learned to manage her affairs and to take
care of herself and her small belongings, without admonition from any
one. At the same time she was learning much of the technique of the
profession, and was deeply interested as she began to understand how
illusions are produced. She declares that one of the proofs that she
was meant to be an actress was her enjoyment of the mechanism of stage
effects.

"I was always on hand when a storm had to be worked," she says, "and
would grind away with a will at a crank that, turning against a tight
band of silk, made the sound of a tremendously shrieking wind. And no
one sitting in front of the house, looking at a white-robed woman
ascending to heaven, apparently floating upward through the blue
clouds, enjoyed the spectacle more than I enjoyed looking at the
ascent from the rear, where I could see the tiny iron support for her
feet, the rod at her back with the belt holding her securely about the
waist, and the men hoisting her through the air, with a painted,
some