"Oh, they'll all know now!" she moaned. "I knew it would come, some day. And I haven't the strength to face it—I haven't the strength!"
I felt, in some way, that the moment was a climactic one.
"But how did it begin?" I asked more gently, as I gazed down at the fragile and girlish body huddled together in the chair.
"It began two years ago," she went on in her tired and throaty monotone. "It began when I saw I was a failure, when I realized that all was useless, that I'd made a mistake."
"What mistake?" I demanded, still in the dark.
"The mistake I wasn't brave enough to face. I thought it was the life I was made for, that they'd never understood at home. Even he couldn't understand, I thought. Then they let me come. I worked, oh, so hard! And when I left the school all I could get was a place in the chorus. I was ashamed to tell them. I pretended I had a part, a real part. He kept arguing that I ought to give it up. He kept asking me to come back. I wasn't brave enough to acknowledge defeat. I still thought my chance would come; I kept asking for more time."
"And then?" I prompted.
"Then I couldn't even stay at the work I had. It became impossible; I can't tell you why. Then I did anything, from extra work with moving pictures to reader in the City Library classes. But I still kept going to the agencies, to the Broadway offices, trying to get a part. And things dragged on and on. And then I did this, this awful thing."
"What awful thing?" I asked, trying to bridge the ever-recurring breaks in her thought. But she ignored the interruption.
"We'd studied together in the same classes at the Wheatley School. And people had said we looked alike. But she was born for that sort of life, for success. As I went down, step by step, she went up. He wrote me that I must be getting famous, for he'd seen my picture on a magazine-cover. It was hers. I pretended it was mine. I pretended I was doing the things she was doing. I let them believe I'd taken a new name, a stage name. I sent them papers that told of her success. I became a cheat, an impostor, a living lie—I became Harriet Walter!"