“I do!” she cried, “I work all the time! But that doesn’t do me any good. It’s all right, perhaps, if you’re just breaking rocks, or digging dirt in some mine; but I’m trying to become a singer and you can’t succeed that way–work will get you only so far!”
“’S that so!” murmured Denver, and at the unspoken challenge the brooding resentment of Drusilla burst forth.
“Yes, it is!” she exclaimed, “and, just because you’ve struck ore, that doesn’t prove that you’re right in everything. I’ve worked and I’ve worked, and that’s all the good it’s done me–I’m a failure, in spite of everything.”
117“Oh, I don’t know,” responded Denver with a superior smile, “you’ve still got your five hundred dollars. A man is never whipped till he thinks he’s whipped–why don’t you go back and take a run at it?”
“Oh, what’s the use of talking?” she cried jumping up, “when you don’t know a thing about it? I’ve tried and I’ve tried and the best I could ever do was to get a place in the chorus. And there you simply ruin your voice without even getting a chance of recognition. Oh, I get so exasperated to see those Europeans who are nothing but big, spoiled children go right into a try-out and take a part away from me that I know I can render perfectly. But that’s it, you see, they’re perfectly undisciplined, but they can throw themselves into the part; and the director just takes my name and address and says he’ll call me up if he needs me.”
Denver grunted and said nothing and as he swung his hammer again the leash to her passions gave way.
“Yes, and I hate you!” she burst out, “you’re so big and self-satisfied. But I guess if you were trying to break into grand opera you wouldn’t be quite so intolerant!”
“No?” commented Denver stopping to shift his grip and she stamped her foot in fury.
“No, you wouldn’t!” she cried half weeping with rage as she contemplated the wreck of her hopes, “don’t you know that Mary Garden and Schumann-Heink and Geraldine Farrar and all of them, that 118are now our greatest stars, had to starve and skimp and wait on the impresarios before they could get their chance? There’s a difference between digging a hole in the ground and moving a great audience to tears; so just because you happen to be succeeding right now, don’t think that you know it all!”
“All right,” agreed Denver, “I’ll try to remember that. And of course I’m nothing but a miner. But there’s one thing, and I know it, about all those great stars–they didn’t any of them quit. They might have been hungry and out of a job but they never quit, or they wouldn’t be where they are.”