He was cheerful about it. He talked merely to arrange his thoughts, not because he expected Susan to understand matters far above one whom nature had fashioned and experience had trained to minister satisfyingly to the physical and sentimental needs of man. He assumed that she was as worshipful before his intellect as in the old days. He would have been even more amazed than enraged had he known that she regarded his play as mediocre claptrap, false to life, fit only for the unthinking, sloppily sentimental crowd that could not see the truth about even their own lives, their own thoughts and actions.
"There you go again!" cried he, a few minutes later. "What are you thinking about? I forgot to ask how you got on with Brent. Poor chap—he's had several failures in the past year. He must be horribly cut up. They say he's written out. What does he think he's trying to get at with you?"
"Acting, as I told you," replied Susan. She felt ashamed for him, making this pitiable exhibition of patronizing a great man.
"Sperry tells me he has had that twist in his brain for a long time—that he has tried out a dozen girls or more—drops them after a few weeks or months. He has a regular system about it—runs away abroad, stops the pay after a month or so."
"Well, the forty a week's clear gain while it lasts," said Susan. She tried to speak lightly. But she felt hurt and uncomfortable. There had crept into her mind one of those disagreeable ideas that skurry into some dusky corner to hide, and reappear from time to time making every fit of the blues so much the sadder and aggravating despondency toward despair.
"Oh, I didn't mean to suggest that you wouldn't succeed," Spenser hastened to apologize with more or less real kindliness. "Sperry says Brent has some good ideas about acting. So, you'll learn something—maybe enough to enable me to put you in a good position—if Brent gets tired and if you still want to be independent, as you call it."
"I hope so," said Susan absently.
Spenser was no more absorbed in his career than she in hers; only, she realized how useless it would be to try to talk it to him—that he would not give her so much as ears in an attitude of polite attention. If he could have looked into her head that morning and seen what thoughts were distracting her from hearing about the great play, he would have been more amused and disgusted than ever with feminine frivolity of mind and incapacity in serious matters. For, it so happened that at the moment Susan was concentrating on a new dress. He would have laughed in the face of anyone saying to him that this new dress was for Susan in the pursuit of her scheme of life quite as weighty a matter, quite as worthy of the most careful attention, as was his play for him. Yet that would have been the literal truth. Primarily man's appeal is to the ear, woman's to the eye—the reason, by the way, why the theater—preeminently the place to see—tends to be dominated by woman.
Susan had made up her mind not only that she would rapidly improve herself in every way, but also how she would go about the improving. She saw that, for a woman at least, dress is as much the prime essential as an arresting show window for a dealer in articles that display well. She knew she was far from the goal of which she dreamed—the position where she would no longer be a woman primarily but a personage. Dress would not merely increase her physical attractiveness; it would achieve the far more important end of gaining her a large measure of consideration. She felt that Brent, even Brent, dealer in actualities and not to be fooled by pretenses, would in spite of himself change his opinion of her if she went to him dressed less like a middle class working girl, more like the woman of the upper classes. At best, using all the advantages she had, she felt there was small enough chance of her holding his interest; for she could not make herself believe that he was not deceiving himself about her. However, to strengthen herself in every way with him was obviously the wisest effort she could make. So, she must have a new dress for the next meeting, one which would make him better pleased to take her out to dinner. True, if she came in rags, he would not be disturbed—for he had nothing of the snob in him. But at the same time, if she came dressed like a woman of his own class, he would be impressed. "He's a man, if he is a genius," reasoned she.
Vital though the matter was, she calculated that she did not dare spend more than twenty-five dollars on this toilet. She must put by some of her forty a week; Brent might give her up at any time, and she must not be in the position of having to choose immediately between submitting to the slavery of the kept woman as Spenser's dependent and submitting to the costly and dangerous and repulsive freedom of the woman of the streets. Thus, to lay out twenty-five dollars on a single costume was a wild extravagance. She thought it over from every point of view; she decided that she must take the risk.