ideration. If you
think you will be happier--if you are sure you will have no regret--if,
as I say, you think you can play the one part for a lifetime--well and
good."

"And you are right," she said, bitterly, "to speak of me as an actress,
and not as a human being. I must be playing a part to the end, I
suppose. Perhaps so. Well, I hope I shall please my smaller audience as
well as I seem to have pleased the bigger one."

Then she altered her tone.

"I told you, papa, the other day of my having seen that child run over
and brought back to the woman who was standing on the pavement."

"Yes," said he; but wondering why this incident should be referred to at
such a moment.

"I did not tell you the truth--at least the whole truth. When I walked
away, what was I thinking of? I caught myself trying to recall the way
in which the woman threw her arms up when she saw the dead body of her
child, and I was wondering whether I could repeat it. And then I began
to wonder whether I was a devil--or a woman."

"Bah!" said he. "That is a craze you have at present. You have had fifty
others before. What I am afraid of is that, at the instigation of some
such temporary fad, you will take a step that you will find irrevocable.
Just think it over, Gerty. If you leave the stage, you will destroy many
a hope I had formed; but that doesn't matter. Whatever is most for your
happiness--that is the only point."

"And so you have given me your congratulations, papa," she said, rising.
"I have been so thoroughly trained to be an actress that, when I marry,
I shall only go from one stage to another."

"That was only a figure of speech," said he.

"At all events," she said, "I shall not be vexed by petty jealousies of
other actresses, and I shall cease to be worried and humiliated by what
they say about me in the provincial newspapers."

"As for the newspapers," he retorted, "you have little to complain of.
They have treated _you_ very well. And even if they annoyed you by a
phrase here or there, surely the remedy is simple. You need not read
them. You don't require any recommendation to the public now. As for
your jealousy of other actresses--that was always an unreasonable
vexation on your part--"

"Yes, and that only made it the more humiliating to myself," said she,
quickly.

"But think of this," said he. "You are married. You have been long away
from the scene of your former triumphs. Some day you go to the theatre;
and you fin