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 He replied: "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm taking anything I can get. . . . Why?"

"Oh," she said, "it's all so hateful!" And with a suddenness that amazed him, he found himself behind the barriers of her silence and admitted to a confidence which—though at the time it moved him to a reciprocation in kind—he was to look back upon doubtfully, as if it had been an indelicacy. "If I were a man, I'd do anything—anything but that—dig ditches, anything—work on a farm, anything. You don't know what it is—the managers, the women— such vulgarity—and to be set up on a platform to be stared at, like a freak in a dime museum! . . . If I had learned something—something to make a living by!" But she had only her music and her singing; and her music was nothing, and her singing was scarcely fit for the chorus. She had gone into the "legitimate"—as they called their serious attempts to be dramatic—because the life of a chorus girl was a disgusting vanity to her. She had not succeeded. "I can't do the things they do to succeed," she said. "And neither can you."

"No," he replied, "perhaps I can't. . . . Though I've done one thing since I came here—a thing I didn't believe I could ever have done. And I never will again. Never!"

The emotion gave his face a life which she had not seen in it before. She raised her arm on the rail and leaned her cheek against her hand, watching him.

"Besides," he argued, "what difference does it make whether we succeed or not? What difference will it make in a hundred years from now—so long as