ta Fuller, for example. He had to
do with some intricate machine or other that was vital to printing, and
he was perfecting something connected with it or connecting something
needed for its perfection that would revolutionize the thing the machine
now did (whatever it was). Harrietta refused to call him an inventor.
She said it sounded so impecunious. They had known each other for six
years. When she didn't feel like talking he didn't say: "What's the
matter?" He never told her that women had no business monkeying with
stocks or asked her what they called that stuff her dress was made of,
or telephoned before noon. Twice a year he asked her to marry him,
presenting excellent reasons. His name was Carrigan. You'd like him.

"When I marry," Harrietta would announce, "which will be never, it will
be the only son of a rich iron king from Duluth, Minnesota. And I'll go
there to live in an eighteen-room mansion and pluck roses for the
breakfast room."

"There are few roses in Duluth," said Ken, "to speak of. And no
breakfast rooms. You breakfast in the dining room, and in the winter you
wear flannel underwear and galoshes."

"California, then. And he can be the son of a fruit king. I'm not
narrow."

Harrietta was thirty-seven and a half when there came upon her a great
fear. It had been a wretchedly bad season. Two failures. The rent on her
two-room apartment in Fifty-sixth Street jumped from one hundred and
twenty-five, which she could afford, to two hundred a month, which she
couldn't. Mary--Irish Mary--her personal maid, left her in January.
Personal maids are one of the superstitions of the theatrical
profession, and an actress of standing is supposed to go hungry rather
than maidless.

"Why don't you fire Irish Mary?" Ken had asked Harrietta during a period
of stringency.

"I can't afford to."

Ken understood, but you may not. Harrietta would have made it clear.
"Any actress who earns more than a hundred a week is supposed to have a
maid in her dressing room. No one knows why, but it's true. I remember
in The Small-Town Girl I wore the same gingham dress throughout three
acts, but I was paying Mary twenty a week just the same. If I hadn't
some one in the company would have told some one in another company that
Harrietta Fuller was broke. It would have seeped through the director to
the manager, and next time they offered me a part they'd cut my salary.
It's absurd, but there it is. A vicious circle."

Irish M