"Then, in the name of common sense, dear girl, why did you go on the stage? Home life and a stage career are as antipodal as the poles."
"And yet you manage to blend the two rather charmingly," she retorted.
"Absurd! I'm not trying for a career, and as for home life ... my dear child, it's the merest pretense. Half the time we are not at home and the flat has either to be let or remain closed. One never knows from day to day when the furniture will be packed off to storage."
"Yes ... I presume you are right.... How did I come to go on the stage?... Well, I suppose it was because I wanted a career of some kind.... I wanted to do something; you know how empty and shallow the average girl's life is, with the endless round of parties, visits, fancy work and that sort of thing. I was an only daughter, too. Father was well-to-do and wrapped up in the affairs of the small city in which we lived. After he died, mother thought she would like to travel. We went abroad. It was over there that the idea of a career took a stronger hold on me. About the only talent I could lay any claim to was music. I had always played and sung at our home concerts and church sociables.... But mother didn't encourage me in my ambitions. She argued that, since father had left us comfortably fixed, why should I want to worry my head about work? Besides, she said my first duty was to her as long as she lived. So there it rested.... We just drifted from place to place ... vegetating...."
"Some parents are like that," I commented.
Leila rested her chin in her palms and went on.... "After mother died I resolved to go after that career. I returned abroad to study...." She chuckled a little, probably, at the remembrance.... "Of course, the teachers said I had a great future ahead of me ... with application and patience ... infinite patience. Meanwhile I must study—and pay exorbitant prices for my tuition. The income which had been ample for my needs heretofore did not go very far under the new régime. I found it necessary to cut into the capital, realizing the danger of such a move, but soothing my fears with the dream of my great future.... Well, honey, the splendid career as you see has ended in the chorus.... And, what's more, I'm living on my salary." She picked up Will's guitar and began strumming on it. "What I can't understand," she continued after a while, "what I feel most is the fact that I don't seem able to pull myself out of it. I see other girls lifting themselves to better positions; I know I can sing better than any one of them.... There was Miss Nelson whom you succeeded. As soon as I heard she was to retire I went to the manager and asked for her place. He sent me to the musical director, who heard me sing, commented favorably and said he would report to the manager. That was the last I heard of it until rehearsal was called and I learned that you had been engaged.... Tell me, honestly, what's the matter with me? Why don't I get on? Is it because I haven't any pull or because—" She did not finish her sentence, but switched to another.... "Take our prima donna for example: three years ago she was playing a part not bigger than yours. Now look at her! My voice is as good as hers, if not better, but I can't get them to let me even understudy her." ...
A vision of the prima donna passed before my eye; an insipidly pretty woman whose sudden rise to fame had turned her empty little head. Vain, impetuous, over-keyed, already the marks of dissipation were leaving their indelible stamp. Whenever I saw her, resplendent in sables, dangling her jewelled gold-mesh purse, my mind reverted to a well-known club-man's comment on virtue: "I always measure the chastity of the unprotected female by the size of her gold-mesh bag; the larger the bag the less the virtue."
Leila, bent on relieving her mind and heart, went on: "When I went into the chorus it was a choice between that and Macy's. Of course I'd heard things about the life, but I told myself that a girl who wants to can go straight in any walk of life. I had all those copy-book maxims at the tip of my tongue: 'Virtue is its own reward,' and 'Then let us be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labour and to wait,' or something like that.... Willie Stewart—you know the little black-eyed girl who plays next to me on the left—it was she who gave me my first eye-opener. Seeing that I was new at the business, she came to me shortly after we opened and asked me if I didn't want to meet some gentlemen; that she had been asked to bring some of the girls with her to a beefsteak party which was to be pulled off that night. I thanked her and told her I did not care to go. Willie squinted her eyes a little in sizing me up, then treated me to the following advice: 'Look here, angel child, you'd better go back to home and mother. This is no place for a minister's daughter. If you haven't got sense enough to take a chance when it's brought to you on a silver tray—well, all I've got to say is that you're in wrong. Managers want the girls that are popular and the way to be popular is to mingle. Just remember that you don't get anything for nothing in this business or in no other, as far as I've been able to observe. It's give up—give up all along the line and it's only the foxy dame that gets what's comin' to her, even then!'"
"Willie has a very large gold bag, I have noticed," I said.
"And a sealskin coat," Leila added. Then she jumped to her feet and struck at the sofa pillows viciously.... "It isn't the clothes and that sort of thing that appeal to me. It isn't the fact that I'm living in a dingy little room and trying to make ends meet; I'd live on a box of Uneeda Biscuits a day if I saw any hope, the faintest ray of hope that I could win out clean, on merit alone, in the end.... Sometimes I think I'm wrong and that they are right—"