Some time later I had to give in; since I was known as an actress, nothing could hurt me more than to try to become a dancer.
One manager went so far as to tell me that two years of absence from New York had caused the public completely to forget me, and that, in trying to recall myself to their memory, I should seem to be inflicting ancient history on them. As I had then just passed my twentieth birthday I was extremely irritated by that insinuation, and I thought: “Would it then be necessary for me painfully to build up a reputation and to look old to prove that I was young to-day?”
Unable to restrain my feelings any longer, I told the manager what I thought.
“Hell,” he replied, “it isn’t age that counts. It’s the time the public has known you, and you have become too well known as an actress to come back here as a dancer.”
Everywhere I encountered the same answer, and finally I became desperate. I was aware that I had discovered something unique, but I was far from imagining, even in a daydream, that I had hold of a principle capable of revolutionising a branch of æsthetics.
I am astounded when I see the relations that form and colour assume. The scientific admixture of chemically composed colours, heretofore unknown, fills me with admiration, and I stand before them like a miner who has discovered a vein of gold, and who completely forgets himself as he contemplates the wealth of the world before him.
But to return to my troubles.
A manager who, some time before, had done his best to engage me as a singer, and who had absolutely refused to consider me as a dancer, gave a careless consent, thanks to the intervention of a common friend, to an interview at which I was to show him my dances.
I took my robe, which made a neat little bundle, and I set out for the theatre.
Mrs. Hoffmann’s daughter accompanied me. We went in by the stage entrance. A single gas jet lighted the empty stage. In the house, which was equally dark, the manager, seated in one of the orchestra chairs, looked at us with an air of boredom, almost of contempt. There was no dressing-room for my change of clothing, not even a piano to accompany me. But the opportunity was a precious one, all the same. Without delay I put on my costume, there on the stage and over my dress. Then I hummed an air and started in to dance very gently in the obscurity. The manager came nearer and nearer, and finally ascended the platform.