The sun was high in the sky and Georgia was in New York. She knew where to go; in her former visit she had chanced to relieve the wants of a poor widow living in an obscure tenement-house somewhere near the East River, and here, despairing of finding her way through the labyrinth of streets alone, she gave the cabman directions to drive. Strangely calm she was now, but oh, the settled night of anguish in those large, wild, black eyes!
The poor are mostly grateful, and warm and heartfelt was Georgia's welcome to that humble roof. Questions were asked, but none answered; all Georgia said she wanted was a private room there for two or three days.
Alone at last, she sat down to think. There was no time to brood over the past—her life-work was to be accomplished now. What next? was the question that arose before her, the question that must be promptly answered. How was she to live in this wilderness of human beings?
She leaned her head on her hands, forcibly wrenched her thoughts from the past and fixed them on the present. How was she to earn a livelihood? The plain, practical, homely question roused all her sleeping energies, and did her good.
The stage! She thought of that first with an electric bound of the pulse; she knew, she was certain she could win a name and fame there; but could she, who had become the wife of Richmond Wildair, become an actress? She knew his fastidious pride on this point; she knew the fact of her having been an actress in her childhood had never ceased to gall him more than anything else.
Georgia Darrell would have stepped on the boards and won the highest laurels the profession could bestow, but Georgia Wildair had another to think of beside herself. Much as she longed for that exciting life—that life for which nature had so well qualified her, physically and mentally, for which she had so strong a desire—she put the thought aside and gave it up.
Though she had wrenched asunder the chains that bound her to him, she still carried a clanking fragment with her, and, no longer a free agent, she must think of something else. Another reason there was why that profession could not be hers—she did not wish to be known or discovered by any she had ever known before; her desire was to be as dead to Richmond Wildair as if she had never existed—to leave him free, unfettered as he had been before this fatal marriage. And, to make the more sure of this, she had resolved to drop his name and assume another. She would take her mother's name of Randall; it was her own name, too—Georgia Randall Darrell.
But what was she to do? Females before now had won fame as artists, and Georgia had genius and an artist's soul. But she would have to wait and live on this poor widow's bounty meantime, and that was too abhorrent to her nature to be for a moment thought of. Nothing remained but to become a teacher or governess, and even in this she was doubtful if she could succeed. She knew little or nothing of music, and that seemed absolutely essential in a governess, but still she would try. If that failed, something else must be tried.
Drawing pen and ink toward her, she sat down and indited the following:
WANTED—A situation as governess in a respectable private family, by one capable of teaching French, German, and Latin, and all the branches of English education. Address G. R., etc.