“Oh, please, Mr. Hunt, don’t go,” she begged. “All of a sudden I have begun to feel that if I don’t tell some one my secret and ask you to approve of me or at least to try to forgive me for what I am doing I shall perish.” Actually Polly would now have pushed her visitor back into his chair if he had not sat down again so promptly as to make it unnecessary.
“You are sure you wish to confide in me, Miss Polly? Of course you understand that I will tell no one. But if your mother knows and approves of you, why surely no other person is necessary,” he argued.
In reply the girl laughed. “Mother is an angel and for that reason perhaps she does not always approve or understand me exactly. In this case she is just permitting me to have my own way because she promised to let me try and do what I could to become a successful actress and she never goes back on her word. Of course my method seems queer to her and probably will to you. But after all it is the way I see things and one can’t look out of any one’s eyes but one’s own. Surely you believe that, Mr. Hunt?”
Of course any one who really understood Polly O’Neill, Betty Ashton for instance, would have understood at once that she was now beginning to explain her own wilfulness. Yet her question did sound convincing, for assuredly one can have no other vision than one’s own.
Richard Hunt nodded sympathetically, although Polly was looking so absurdly young and so desperately in earnest that he would have preferred to smile.
She was leaning forward with her chin resting on her hand and gazing intently at him. What she saw was a man who seemed almost middle-aged to her. And yet to the girl he seemed almost ideally handsome. His features were strong and well-cut, the nose aquiline, the mouth large and firm. And he was wearing the kindest possible expression. For half an instant Polly’s thoughts flew away from herself. Surely if any one in the world could be worthy of Margaret Adams it was Richard Hunt. Then she settled down to the telling of her own story.
“You know of course, Mr. Hunt, without my having to say anything more about it, that ever since I was a little girl I have dreamed and hoped and prayed of some day becoming a great actress. Mother says that there was some one in my family once, one of my Irish aunts, I believe, who ran away from home in order to go on the stage and was never recognized again. I have thought sometimes that perhaps I inherited her ambition. One never knows about things like that, life is so queer. Anyhow when a dozen girls in Woodford formed a Camp Fire and we lived together in the woods for over a year working and playing, mother and Betty and my sister expected me to get over my foolish ideas and learn something through our club that might make me adopt a more sensible career. I don’t mean to be rude to you, Mr. Hunt,” Polly was profoundly serious, there was now no hint of amusement in her dark blue eyes or in her mobile face, “you understand I am only telling you what my family and friends thought about people who were actors—not what I think. I don’t see why acting isn’t just as great and useful as the other arts if one is conscientious and has real talent. But the trouble with me has been all along that I haven’t any real talent. I suppose if I had been a genius from the first no one would have cared to oppose me. Well the Camp Fire did not influence me against what I wanted to do; it only made me feel more in earnest than I had ever been before. For we girls learned such a lot about courage and perseverance and being happy even if things were not going just the way one liked, that it has all been a great help to me recently, more than at any time in my life.”
Richard Hunt nodded gravely. “I see,” he said quietly, although in point of fact he did not yet understand in the least what Polly was trying to explain, nor why she should review so much of her past life before coming to her point. He was curiously interested, although ordinarily he might have been bored by such a disjointed story.
Polly was too intense at the moment to have bored anyone. There she sat in her red dress against the darker background of the sofa with her figure almost in shadow and the light falling only upon her odd, eager face.
“I ran away from Miss Adams and from you, not because I was such a coward that I meant to give up the thing I was trying for, but because I knew that I must have a harder time if I was ever to amount to anything. You see people were trying to make things so easy for me and in a way they were making them more difficult. Margaret gave me that place in her company when I did not deserve it; you tried to show me how to act when I could not learn; my friends were complimenting me when all the time they must have known I was a failure. I couldn’t bear it, Mr. Hunt; really I could not. I am lots of horrid things, but I am not a fraud. Then Margaret told me what a difficult time she had at the beginning of her career and how no one had helped her. Of course she meant to make me feel that I might be more successful because of my friends’ aid, but I did not see things just that way. Oh, I do hope you had to work dreadfully hard at the beginning of your profession and had lots of failures,” Polly concluded so unexpectedly and so solemnly that this time Richard Hunt could not refrain from laughing.