Lillian reflected on these matters as she rode along, or looked from a hotel window. If she went to Massillon this summer, would she see her cousin again? And Buster, and Marion Benedict? Would she stay there, now, and go to school, or go back to the road for another season? She thought dreamily of these and other things. She did not trouble much, about the future, or the past—then, or later. She followed a kind of magic path, that opened before, and closed behind her as she passed along.

There came a season when the theatrical business was poor. The road companies, especially, suffered. Their profits became more than ever precarious. Motion picture shows were cutting into their business. One-night-stand theatres were being converted into “picture palaces,” and “nickelodeons,” that offered pretty good entertainment at ridiculously low prices, and had very light “overhead.” The combinations, the smaller ones, with their salaries and railroad fares, could not compete. Lillian went out with quite a pretentious company, and a play which was “sure to get to New York and make a hit on Broadway.” It did not get much further than Washington, where it opened. At Baltimore, or Richmond, it came to grief. The company had trouble getting home. At a later time, Lillian wrote: “When we were ambitious and went into better productions, the plays seemed to fail.” But this was due rather to the new conditions in the amusement world, than because of the plays themselves. The “movies” had filed a claim on the melodrama. One could scorn them, as many did in the beginning, but the handwriting was on the wall.

Mary Gish wondered what was best to do next. She had saved some money, but with nothing coming in, how quickly it would go.

For one thing, she must have a new dress. The children said so, quite insistently, and she knew they were right.

“We begged her to buy a new one. Finally, one day, she bought some Alice-blue material and made herself a gown. She always made all the clothes, herself. Then we begged her to get a new hat. So she went to the five-and-ten-cent store, and bought a frame for a little toque, and covered it with little five-and-ten roses. She looked so pretty in her new things—and we were all so happy. We thought everything so beautiful. She was not to wear them until Easter.

“We lived in furnished rooms over by Eighth Avenue, away up I don’t know how many flights, next the roof. Mother put her dress on a hanger, and hung it in a closet, with the hat over it. We all gathered to admire it. It was such an event for mother to have a new dress.

“That night there came up a terrible rain, and the roof over the closet leaked. The water came through in streams, and ran down over mother’s new hat, and the color came out of the lovely five-and-ten roses and dripped all over the new Alice-blue dress. It was ruined. We all cried over it; it was a real tragedy.”

XIII
WHERE THE “ROAD” ENDS. NELL

News came to Mrs. Gish that a brother in St. Louis had died, leaving a widow. She took the children to Massillon, went to St. Louis, and with her sister-in-law, opened a confectionery and ice-cream parlor, in East St. Louis, a rather drab railroad town across the river.