Still Zuleime was silent.
“After the opera season is over, I make no doubt that your youth, beauty and grace, and your very fine voice, will secure you a permanent engagement at an advanced salary. Will you go with me to the manager to-morrow?”
“No,” said Zuleime, “I should not dare to go upon the stage. I could not face an audience.”
“And you need not face them! You would be in a group of young girls, and no one would notice you, except casually as a part of the scenery. The attention of the audience is taken up with the principal performers. Besides, no one will know who you are. Your name need not appear upon the bills. I will take every care of your feelings, if, indeed, you can be sensible of them when hunger and cold are felt.”
“I do not like the life,” said Zuleime. “I had almost as willingly starve.”
The actress arose and rung the bell.
“Oh! it is nothing to me, Mrs. Fairfax. Do as you please. I have no earthly interest to serve in persuading you to this step,” she said, with the old, cross, querulous look on her haggard face, and in her beautiful dark, gray eyes.
Bertha came in and cleared away the table.
Mrs. Knight walked up and down the room in a hasty. irritated manner.
“I wish I was at work again! I am sick of my holyday already! Since I cannot afford to abandon this hateful art, I wish I were always delving at it, and there came no pause for self-recollection. I wish I were perpetually Queen Katherine, Mrs. Haller, Isabella, Imogene, Lady Macbeth, Bianca Fazio, and the others, going incessantly through the circle like the earth through the signs of the zodiac. I wish I were always somebody else, anybody else than poor Ida Knight.” And she threw herself into a chair, glancing at Zuleime with a strained, appealing, accusing look. But the wan face of the dying girl, with its hectic flush, smote the rock in her heart, and she moved to her side and took her hand and said, gently, though with the same tone and look of querulous suffering. “It is a wretched life! I feel it so—only it is not so bad as starving, and seeing your child starve. My dear, it is something to me whether I persuade you to do this thing or not. I cannot bear to see you suffer so. Your necessities weigh upon my heart in addition to my own. And really,” she added, with the same frowning, irritated look, “really, I have such a burden of my own, that I grow restive under a feather of anybody else’s.”