When we were in the Grand Central the following night, I tried to appear cheerful, but I could not prevent the tears running down my face, and when finally he took my hand to say good-bye, I said:
“Oh, it’s dreadful for me to say this; b-but if I don’t see you soon again I—t-think I will die.”
He bent down when I said that and kissed me right on my lips, and he did not seem to care whether every one in the station saw us or not. Then I knew that he did love me, and that knowledge sent me flying blindly down the platform. After I was aboard, I found I had taken the wrong train to Providence. I should have taken an earlier or a later one. Lil was already there, and was to have met me at the station from the earlier train, but the train I had taken would not get in till four in the morning.
When I arrived in Providence I did not know where to go. I had Lil’s address, but she had written me she was living at a “very respectable house” where the people would have been terribly shocked to know she was a model, and I felt I could not go there at such an hour in the morning. The rain was coming down in torrents. A colored boy was carrying my bag, and he asked me where I wanted to go. Indeed, I did not know. When I hesitated, he said that the hotels didn’t take ladies alone, but that he knew of an all-night restaurant where I could get something hot to eat and I could stay there till morning. So he took me over to Minks’. I had often eaten in Minks’ restaurant in Boston, and the place looked quite familiar to me. I had a cup of hot coffee and a sandwich, and then I asked the waitress if there was some place where I could go and freshen or clean up a bit. She whispered to the man at the desk, and he nodded, and then she beckoned to me to follow her. We went upstairs to a sort of loft. It was bare, save of packing cases, but she showed me to a little cracked looking-glass where she said I could do my hair. I told her I had been on the train all night, and she said sympathetically:
“Sure, you look it.”
I went over to Lil’s boarding-house about seven in the morning. She was right near Minks’, and said I was foolish not to have come right over.
Well, we played every night in the theatre in Providence, and we made what theatrical people call a “hit.” The whole town turned out to see us. The girls were all as pleased as could be, and so was Mr. Hirsch, and they made all kinds of plans for the road tour, but I could think of nothing but New York, and I was so lonely, in spite of the noisy company of the girls, that I used to go over and look at the railway tracks that I knew ran clear to New York. And I thought of Paul! I thought of Paul every single minute. The little maid would slip his letters every morning under my door, and I used to cry and laugh before I even opened them and I held them to my lips and face, and I kept them all in the bosom of my dress, right next to me.
We had finished our engagement. Lil and I were coming out of the dressing-room the last night when somebody slapped me on the back. I turned around, and there was Mr. Davis. He was so glad to see me that he nearly wrung my hand off, and he insisted on walking home with us. He told me he was now manager of a theatrical company, and that he had been looking around for me ever since Lil told him I was in New York.
“Now, Marion,” he said, “you are going to begin where you left off in Montreal, and it’s up to you to make good. You’ve got it in you, and I want to be the man to prove it.”
I asked him what he meant, and he said he was starting a new “show” in Boston that week, and that he had a part for me that would give me an opportunity.