By dint of the strenuous will of others, to which he yielded himself, he was kept on his feet through the whole run of the play.
And then, released from surveillance, exhausted in mind and body—he fell again.
He blazed like a comet across the theatrical world, and then set as suddenly as he had risen.
Marion heard of it and shuddered. She had had a narrow escape.
She never wrote another play—at least, she never wrote another that pleased a manager. She said she had not time. In spite of her success, she felt a distaste for things theatrical. And perhaps she found that success is not as warm a garment for a shivering life as she had expected. There is a little fleecy wrap called affection, within the reach of all of us, which she might have donned. But, as she often said, there was, unfortunately, no one for whom she had much affection. She was alone in the world. Her interest in the theatre was gradually replaced by religion. Once she heard with real regret that Lenore had lost her memory, and chloral was hinted at as the cause. She thought of trying to save her, of making an earnest appeal to that better self which, according to Marion, exists in all of us. But when she made further inquiries about her, with a view to rescuing her, she was daunted by the discovery that Lenore had been privately married to Delacour for some time past, and that her declension, which was really due to drink, dated from the time of the marriage.
A year passed. Delacour began to make fitful reappearances, then more frequent ones. He took and kept regular engagements. But his wife returned no more.
Presently Marion's own play was revived with success. It was one of Delacour's greatest parts. And Marion went to see it, hidden behind the curtains of her box.
The years since she had last sat in that box had not dealt kindly with her. Her discontented face showed that she was one of the many victims of arrested development, still hampered in middle age by the egotistic longings of youth. In youth we all want to receive instead of to give, to be loved, to be served, to be admired. Middle age is the time to reverse engines, the time to love, to serve, to give rather than to receive. Marion had not learned that elementary lesson of life. We all recognise them at sight, the nervous, fretful faces of the middle-aged men and women who want to be loved. And love knows them, too, and—flies them.
The manager, somewhat pinched and grizzled, as from a long fast, came in to see her between the acts, and growled out his disapproval of his leading lady.