“You did?”
“Sure! Changed it for her. She’s Mrs. ’Dolph now.” And he grinned happily.
She understood then why he had been grinning in just that way for a number of weeks. Had she not been so absorbed in self, she would have noticed that his smile [119] ]was gayer—different from any he had ever worn. It made his face quite boyish.
The decline of Goring after that was gradual. As a matter of fact, it could have been dated actually from the night of her non-appearance. Upon the heels of that night followed a change, scarcely noticeable at first, in the sea of eyes and lips and hands to which she looked for signs of approval. Slowly—oh very slowly—there crept into the audience’s response to her a quality mechanical, automatic almost, as if largely force of habit, a quality that presaged the beginning of the end. Whether in herself or the public she could not tell. It was nothing tangible, nothing definite. But something had happened. The fine thread by which an actress chains herself to popular favor had snapped. In vain she told herself it was just nervous imagination. It made her choke with fear.
One thing Jane Goring had failed to take into consideration: Than the highest rung of the ladder there is nothing higher; and unless one dies having reached the top, there must be a descent. Youth pushes its way upward relentlessly, and those who have been must make way for those who will be. A ladder with top rung overcrowded would of necessity break.
Had she possessed the art of Bernhardt or the intellect of Fiske—that magnetic quality of soul that charms with the mellowing years—she could have laughed at time. But her ability consisted chiefly in a technique, the accumulated result of stage tricks that only up to a certain point can present itself as youth.
With an eagerness that approached hysteria she reached [120] ]out for the adulation that for years she had accepted without question as her due. The thirst for it was the thirst of fever. Even the tame robins she had always regarded as more or less of a joke, she began to seek them as they in the past had sought her. The desire to be seen about pursued by youth; to lunch and tea at fashionable restaurants in their company; to hold the center of the public eye at any cost, became a mania. It was as grim an effort as that of a doomed man to cling to the last moments of life.
And when a year or so later came the inevitable day when Cleeburg said to her—trying to speak gently—
“Come, Jane, let’s talk horse sense. No use your trying to play a chicken! God knows you ain’t one!”—
Jane Goring went home, flung open her bedroom windows letting in an uncompromising flood of sunlight, sat down at her dressing-table and looked herself squarely in the face. The whiteness—smooth, glowing—which had made her skin like gardenia petals in the old days had gone long since. She had grown accustomed to simulating it with modern triumphs of the beauty parlor. But sitting there with God’s spotlight turned full on her, it was not the realization of muscles sagging as if pulled down by the hand of Time that made her shudder. It was not the gooselike shriveling of her throat when she turned her head that made her eyes shut with pain. It was the knowledge of ebbing self-confidence, the face to face admission that her day was done. From now on it would be—“Let’s go to see Jane Goring. She used to be—” or “Don’t let’s go to see Jane Goring. She used to be—”