Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/94

 tricky," she says. "Could any one who is not tricky get ahead in the theater?" She is deeply egotistic. "Well," she asks, "do you think it's possible to be as modest as a hermit-thrush and still make your living singing at the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge during rush hours?" She has faults of pettiness that seem impossibly opposed to her large and generous qualities; but with all the disintegrating impulses of variable temperament and contradictory moods, she has a strength of will that gives her character and direction.

My friend the author fell insanely in love with her. She petted him and encouraged him amiably until it came to a question of marrying him. "No," she said. "No. Never." Well, but why not? "Because it's impossible." She refused to see him. She would not answer his letters. He behaved like a lunatic, drinking and weeping in all the cafés of the Rialto. I went to her, to speak on his behalf; and she listened to me, sitting bolt-upright beside her reading-lamp, with her hands on the arms of her chair, as unmoved as a judge.

She said: "I can't help it. That's the way life is. He'll have to get through it the best way he can." I begged her to see him. She shook her head. "I'll never see him again." And she kept her word, for years.