Carrie looked and beheld a new contract made out like the other one, with the exception of the new figures of salary and time. With a hand trembling from excitement she affixed her name.
"One hundred and fifty a week!" she murmured, when she was again alone. She found, after all—as what millionaire has not?—that there was no realising, in consciousness, the meaning of large sums. It was only a shimmering, glittering phrase in which lay a world of possibilities.
Down in a third-rate Bleecker Street hotel, the brooding Hurstwood read the dramatic item covering Carrie's success, without at first realising who was meant. Then suddenly it came to him and he read the whole thing over again.
"That's her, all right, I guess," he said.
Then he looked about upon a dingy, moth-eaten hotel lobby.
"I guess she's struck it," he thought, a picture of the old shiny, plush-covered world coming back, with its lights, its ornaments, its carriages, and flowers. Ah, she was in the walled city now! Its splendid gates had opened, admitting her from a cold, dreary outside. She seemed a creature afar off—like every other celebrity he had known.
"Well, let her have it," he said. "I won't bother her."
It was the grim resolution of a bent, bedraggled, but unbroken pride.
CHAPTER XLIV
AND THIS IS NOT ELF LAND: WHAT GOLD WILL NOT BUY
When Carrie got back on the stage, she found that over night her dressing-room had been changed.