ho asks you or the
first man who says he'll die if you don't. You've got lots of time."

That kind of advice is a good thing for the young. Two weeks later
Harrietta married a man she had met on the train between Evanston and
New York. His name was Lawrence Fuller, and Harrietta had gone to school
with him in Evanston. She had lost track of him later. She remembered,
vaguely, people had said he had gone to New York and was pretty wild.
Young as she was and inexperienced, there still was something about his
face that warned her. It was pathological, but she knew nothing of
pathology. He talked of her and looked at her and spoke, masterfully and
yet shyly, of being with her in New York. Harrietta loved the way his
hair sprang away from his brow and temples in a clean line. She shoved
the thought of his chin out of her mind. His hands touched her a good
deal--her shoulder, her knee, her wrist--but so lightly that she
couldn't resent it even if she had wanted to. When they did this, queer
little stinging flashes darted through her veins. He said he would die
if she did not marry him.

They had two frightful years together and eight years apart before he
died, horribly, in the sanatorium whose enormous fees she paid weekly.
They had regularly swallowed her earnings at a gulp.

Naturally a life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play
tragedy while you're living it. Harrietta served her probation in stock,
road companies, one-night stands before she achieved Broadway. In five
years her deft comedy method had become distinctive; in ten it was
unique. Yet success--as the stage measures it in size of following and
dollars of salary--had never been hers.

Harrietta knew she wasn't a success. She saw actresses younger, older,
less adroit, lacking her charm, minus her beauty, featured, starred,
heralded. Perhaps she gave her audiences credit for more intelligence
than they possessed, and they, unconsciously, resented this. Perhaps if
she had read the Elsie Series at eleven, instead of Dickens, she might
have been willing to play in that million-dollar success called Gossip.
It was offered her. The lead was one of those saccharine parts, vulgar,
false, and slyly carnal. She didn't in the least object to it on the
ground of immorality, but the bad writing bothered her. There was, for
example, a line in which she was supposed to beat her breast and say:
"He's my mate! He's my man! And I'm his woman!! I love him, I tell y