ou'll get seventy dollars.' I thought, and why
should I _not_ make a favorable impression? Yet, if I fail now in New
York, I can go West or South not much harmed. If I wait till I am
older and fail, it will ruin my life. I slipped my hand in my pocket
and gave a little farewell tap to the contract for one hundred
dollars; I took the pen; I looked hard at him. 'There's a heap of
trust asked for in this contract,' I remarked. 'You won't forget your
promise about doubling the contract?'

"'I won't forget anything,' he answered.

"Then I wrote 'Clara Morris' twice, shook hands, and went out and back
to Cincinnati, with an engagement in a New York theater for the coming
season."

As the tangible results of a benefit performance Clara was able to
give her mother a new spring gown and bonnet and send her off to visit
in Cleveland, before turning her face toward Halifax, where she had
accepted a short summer engagement. At the end of it she went on to
New York, engaged rooms in a quiet old-fashioned house near the
theater, and telegraphed her mother to come. "She came," says Miss
Morris, "and that blessed evening found us housekeeping at last. We
were settled, and happily ready to begin the new life in the great,
strange city."

From that moment, through the frenzied days of rehearsal with a new
company, and with a large number of untoward incidents crowded into
each day, life moved swiftly on toward the first appearance of Clara
Morris on the New York stage.

With a sort of dogged despair she lived through the worry of planning
how to buy costumes out of her small reserve fund. When at last all
her gowns were ready, she had two dollars and thirty-eight cents left,
on which she and her mother must live until her first week's salary
should be paid. Worse than that, on the last awful day before the
opening night she had a sharp attack of pleurisy. A doctor was called,
who, being intoxicated, treated the case wrongly. Another physician
had to be summoned to undo the work of the first, and as a result
Daly's new actress was in a condition little calculated to give her
confidence for such an ordeal as the coming one. She says, "I could
not swallow food--_I could not!_ As the hour drew near my mother stood
over me while with tear-filled eyes I disposed of a raw beaten egg;
then she forced me to drink a cup of broth, fearing a breakdown if I
tried to go through five such acts as awaited me without food. I
always kissed her good