“I shall never forget what you’ve done for me. I shall never betray you in any way.”
She kept her word to the letter. Had she followed inclination she would have gone through her performances mechanically. A numbness had taken hold of her, of utter misery, utter futility. But her work did not fall off in brilliance. Particularly in the love scenes and in the final tragic sacrifice, did her beautiful voice shake with a suffering so intense that it was real.
[52]
] Randolph she saw several times a week in his accustomed place in the first row. But his efforts to see her she ignored. A scene with him would be unbearable, leading as it must nowhere. So she left his notes unanswered, knowing he would eventually conclude that his passion the night of their last meeting had been unwelcome, that she was choosing the simplest means of telling him so. He wrote at first anxiously, then demandingly, and when she failed to answer—stopped. When the notes ceased to come she felt more miserably alone than ever in her life, reaching back into the past for their hours together as groping thoughts reach for memories of the dead.
She grew thin as a rail and her pallor was no longer creamy. It was dead white, with unbecoming lines traced from nose to mouth. Seabury remarked the change and suggested that she needed a change of air.
“You’ve been working too hard and you show it. When does your season close?”
“Sometime in June.”
“Why don’t you get Kane to let you off the end of this month?”
“I don’t want to be let off. I’d like to play all summer.”
“Good Lord, it would kill you!”
“It will kill me if I don’t work.”