Look in Your Glass

VOLUME 164

NUMBER 2

AUGUST 1939

BY RUTH GORDON

CHRISTMAS of 1913 may be memorable to most people because it was the last peaceful Christmas before the world was made safe for Democracy, but Christmas 1913 was important to me because I received a present from my only fashionable friend, Virginia Portia Royall, who wintered at Beaufort, South Carolina, and summered at Linekin’s Bay, Maine. She was, I think, about twelve years old at this time. I was sixteen. Virginia Portia Royall was a fairy princess who fluttered briefly in and out of my humdrum life. Her name alone set us worlds apart. Virginia Portia Royall! — whereas I had to arise and face the day as plain Ruth Gordon Jones. Jones seemed to me to be a stigma rather than a surname, and sometimes I wondered if perhaps I might not be a changeling, for I really did not feel like a Jones.

The beauty of Virginia’s name was rivaled only by her own beauty. She was lovely. Besides all this, I imagined Virginia to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Her dresses were handmade, bought in stores, — sometimes Paris stores, — whereas I wore homemade dresses handed down from someone or other and made over for me by my mother. And to cap the climax, her family was exclusive to such a point that I never met them, which display of cautiousness on their part raised them higher in my estimation than anything else they could possibly have done.

Passing Linekin’s Bay in a motorboat, on our excursions to Boothbay Harbor, we could see the Royalls’ summer home rambling elegantly over the rocks of the point where Linekin’s Bay opened out upon the Atlantic Ocean. As we chugged by, we could see the trim Royall yacht riding at anchor in the placid cove opposite their dock, and sometimes we could even glimpse a Royall or two moving about their estate.

Then came the day of the miracle! The annual Children’s Party was being held at our little summer resort, when suddenly Mrs. Miles, the great lady of Christmas Cove, appeared in the doorway, holding by the hand Virginia Portia Royall. It was really and truly she! At once the whole party came to a standstill, and we were all graciously allowed to meet her. What remarkable attentions I in particular showed to her I cannot now remember, but I came away from that party happy in the knowledge that I was to go up to Mrs. Miles’s house the next morning, with two other children, and help to amuse Virginia. I was to spend the morning with Virginia Portia Royall at the great house on the hill, to swim in the icy Maine water pumped exclusively into the glass-enclosed swimming pool. A plunge into it felt like a brisk turn through some sherbet, but icy water was mild persecution compared to the rare enjoyment of the visit.

Copyright 1939, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

All this must have taken place in the summer of 1912, but, once I had this small toe hold in the fashionable world, I could not bear to let the door swing shut. I never saw Virginia again until after my diary and my schooling and many things were finished, but I wrote to her regularly, sometimes in answer to one of her letters and sometimes, after a decent interval, in answer to one of my own. My reward was that, two years after the ice bath at Mrs. Miles’s, we were still in correspondence with one another, and on the Christmas of 1913 she sent me her first and only Christmas present, a forget-me-not blue, morocco-bound diary. It was easily the most elegant thing in our whole house. And even to-day, after its twenty-fiveyear journey through Three Arts Clubs, one-night-stand tours, theatrical boardinghouses, second-rate hotels, first-rate hotels, until at last it and I reached the haven of a permanent home — even to-day, as I look at it, I see at a glance that it still has that rare something which, for want of a better word, I shall call ton. ‘Some class!’ would have been my way of describing it in Wollaston, but, as I say, my diary and I have come a long way.

Until I received it I had never felt any urge to keep a diary, but in our household there was a spirit of thrift which compelled us to use any and every gift. Whether we enjoyed using it was beside the point. Frugality had made sterner stuff out of us.

I saw Virginia once more several summers later when she again visited the Miles home in Christmas Cove. That was after my first season on the stage, when I had returned from a tour with Maude Adams’s company and Virginia had returned from Mile. Lea Bouligny’s Boarding School at Warrenton, but by now she had become too fashionable for practical purposes; she did not favor knowing an actress — which she alone, of all the world in the year 1916, most flatteringly took me to be. And so this small book, my diary, is all that remains of that glorious moment when I first rubbed elbows, ever so distantly, with the great world of Fashion. Hail and farewell, Haut Monde!

It was a glorious experience while it lasted. It seemed a symbol that I was destined for greater things than our shabby half of a double house at 14 Elmwood Avenue, Wollaston, Massachusetts, where my mother and father and I and our cat hoped, dreamed, and somehow scrimped along — scrimped along on $37.50 a week which my father earned as foreman at the Mellin’s Food factory in Boston, seven miles away.

Thirty-seven-fifty was a small sum, even then, for three people and a cat to live on; and from the struggle which we had with it I think it must always have been a small sum. Our existence was hand-me-down and made up out of scraps of nothing, until everything in life seemed to be made over from something else. Yet always there hung over us the bugbear of doctors’ bills, the coal bill, the insurance premium, my father’s new suit, my mother’s new corsets, my new boots which I would outgrow. All these things, looming large in our eyes, hung over us, away out of proportion to their intrinsic worth. Looming even larger was the thought that if my father ever got sick the $37.50 would stop, and then what indeed would become of us? In these moments when we harbored such a prospect, my father’s wages seemed suddenly larger than the riches of Peru, and he would groan and say that he wished he had never left the sea and that the only place where a man could find peace and comfort was aboard a clipper ship, and that with the death of clipper ships our merchant-marine business went, too, and now America wasn’t worth her salt as far as navigation was concerned, and he wished to God he was British, because their consuls always stood by a sailor in port.

This was Choctaw to my mother and me, who had never sailed farther than from New York to Savannah, Georgia, and that only once. So we would look upon my father as one who had been made too wretched by care; for who on earth, with his senses about him, would ever want to be a sailor and go to all the outlandish places my father talked about, such as Bombay, Mozambique, Callao, and Rio? If it had been Paris or London, then we should have approved, but he said he preferred Pernambuco to Paris any day, and London could not hold a candle to Liverpool, although London might be considered a great city by those who had not tried to untangle a vessel from the Tilbury docks. My father was different, and in Wollaston it showed.

I think that my father would have been different in almost any place where he chose to live for lie was unswayed by public opinion. He loved reality— trees, birds, flowers, weather, facts, the stars and the planets — and most of all he loved the sea and ships. My mother loved anything that made my father and me happy, whether she personally enjoyed it or not. And I loved myself and Miss O’Neill, my Latin teacher, and all that had to do with the theatre. How we passed our days bore little resemblance to anything we thought and hoped. Our private worlds lay miles removed from the actualities set down in this small, forget-me-not blue, morocco-bound book: —

MY DIARY

(For the Year 1914, my Senior Year at Q. H. S.)

January 1. — School again today and that visitor for Latin didn’t come and I had that blamed Latin lesson perfectly spiff! I was so disappointed I got excused after recess. ‘A bad headache.’ Ha, ha! This afternoon, after going to the dentist, called on Mrs. Nickerson and had a nice time. Molly Brown was married tonight. We were invited but papa hasn’t a dress suit so we couldn’t go.

January first and a bad headache go often hand in hand, but mine was not the aftermath of a New Year’s celebration. A New Year’s cerebration seemed to be my trouble. My headache was born of disappointment and an effort to attract, attention. My whole life, at this period, was centred in one huge consolidated effort to please and impress my Latin teacher, the beautiful Miss Elizabeth O’Neill, idol of Quincy High School for as many years as she cared to reign. My original plan had been to shine for her in front of the expected visitor, but owing to his absence that scheme had gone askew, leaving me in such a state of frustration that a headache was all I could muster. I hoped that Miss O’Neill and my classmates might take it. to be the start of a long, serious illness.

There were very few things I could do for Miss O’Neill, for I should have been ashamed to give her anything humble, and a lavish gift was not within my means. But a gift I could give her was to do honor to her teaching, and this was what I had planned to do that day. I had studied the assignment in Vergil with extra care and had arranged my translation of it in a kind of singsong rhythm which I hoped was poetry — blank verse, free verse, or whatever. At any rate, it had taken a good deal of work, for I first had to make a literal translation for myself, then rearrange it until some of the words rhymed, and then memorize it, so that, whatever part of the passage I was called on for, I could spring up and reel it off fluently, as though I were reading English.

This was the predicament of poverty, for if I could have bought. Miss O’Neill a present I should never have thought of twisting my brains in two. But I had figured that through my acute erudition I could let the unknown visitor see what wonders her teaching produced. The only wonder it did produce, however, was to convince the class that I was the lucky possessor of a ‘pony’ or a ‘trot,’ and for all my pains I was merely regarded as a crook. The blow was too much, and so a bodily ailment was manufactured to try to interest my fellow man. But alas! No one was interested in that either, excepting myself. Ha, ha!

I feel sure I did not mind missing Molly Brown’s wedding, for I had learned a forcible lesson in regard to attending all such functions. Once before we had had to refuse a wedding invitation, owing to my father’s same lack of a dress suit. That wedding had been the supreme high spot of all Wollaston social activity — the wedding of Gertrude Waterhouse. The Waterhouses were the rich family of our town and lived in a white-columned mansion built on a terrace high up on the hill. I scarcely knew what the Waterhouses looked like, but in the early days when my father and mother had first come to live in Wollaston they had joined a whist club to which the Waterhouses also belonged. But time and taxes had long since made that only a memory, and it; had been many years since my parents had visited the Waterhouses or vice versa. It. must have been a very large wedding indeed for our family to have been included.

However, the arrival of the invitation had caused an excited flurry, and my mother’s eyes had lighted up just at the sight of it; but there was no use even discussing it, for the fact had to be faced that my father had no dress suit, and anything short of a dress suit would have shocked this creamy parchment invitation and brought down shame on all our heads. We may not have had the wherewithal, but we certainly knew what, was what. And so, after quite a little talk and more figuring, my mother and father decided to send Miss Gertrude Waterhouse a cut-glass water pitcher and our regrets. The water pitcher was sent direct from Smith, Patterson’s and cost just under four dollars. The regrets were written in my mother’s waggly handwriting on stationery specially bought, for the occasion, from our local merchant, Mr. Shunk. Going or not going — either way — set us back financially quite a bit.

On the evening of the Waterhouse wedding my father was in a taciturn mood all through supper. It was a soft spring night, but perhaps the gentle breezes only served to remind him of the days when he and my mother had first come to Wollaston, a young couple full of high hopes, to whom all men had seemed more nearly equal and the difference between them and their grand neighbors not so clearly defined. I don’t think that he minded for himself. It was my mother he was thinking of, and so, to conceal any such feelings, he was good and cross.

I, of course, was all unconscious of this, but I did know my father’s moods, and that if at such a time anyone asked his permission for anything the answer would be ‘NO.’ So after supper I drifted out, ostensibly to play, but, once outside, I rushed headlong up to the hill and the scene of the great event. All Wollaston had congregated on Lincoln Avenue in front of the imposing white house, and stood humbly gawking, to see what, they could see. I don’t remember seeing anything, except bright lights and a throng milling inside, and once I thought I saw the bride coming down the stairs, but afterwards, walking home in the darkness with my brain a little cooled off, I couldn’t honestly be sure. Anyway it had been wonderful just standing there, watching a house where such fashionable events were taking place, for even if I couldn’t, see them I knew that they were going on.

I went home in a kind of mystic trance, unaware even that it was well past nine o’clock, an unheard-of hour for any of our family to be idling through the streets. As I wandered dreamily into our front hall, my father’s voice brought me back to my senses with a jerk. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded.

‘Only up ’watching the wedding,’ I answered, innocent of class pride, for the last time in my life.

‘Why, you old goat!’ my father shouted at me. ‘You old goat!’ ho kept on shouting; and, grabbing me by the ear, he thumped my head down on our golden-oak dining table, while my mother made faces over his shoulder that I wasn’t to mind or get upset. ‘You got no earthly pride. You’re yellow! You’re as yellow as an old goat!’ he wound up, letting go of my ear at last. So when Molly Brown was married I am surprised I even took enough notice of the fact to write it down.

January 2.—This afternoon I went over to the Cody’s to call on Miss Alice Claire Elliott, the first actress I have ever met. She certainly is the prettiest girl and is awfully dear!!! Full of fun!! We had lots of fun dancing. She showed me the South American tango and the real ‘Castle Walk,’ She’s here for a week. I certainly am crazy about her. Tonight I hurriedly decided to go to the Braintree German and I had a wonderful time. The boys are great dancers. John Porter came home with me. He’s awfully nice.

Miss Alice Claire Elliott was the first actress I ever knew, and the only actress who, as long as I knew her, never once had a job By a miracle of good fortune, I met her at an unlikely summer resort where I was visiting a school friend, Katherine Foliett. The name of the place was Green Hill Beach, and it was about twenty miles from my home in Wollaston. The Follett family spent their summers in a small cottage, one of a row of cottages built so close together that when a neighbor sneezed the adjoining household automatically said ‘Gesundheit.'

Next door to the Folletts lived the Cody family, and when once Mrs. Cody told me her sister was an actress in New York, there was really nothing I would not have done for Mrs. Cody’s sake. And then when she told me that Miss Alice Claire Elliott was actually coming to Green Hill Beach, I remember looking at the youngest Cody child and thinking that she was the darlingest, handsomest creature I had ever seen.

When Miss Alice Claire Elliott actually did arrive, it was after dark, unfortunately, and I could not catch a glimpse of her. But the next morning, as soon as I smelled coffee, I went over to pay my respects. My first New York actress was wearing a kimono and sat idly in the Cody sitting room as though she intended to wear it for the rest of the morning. This at once set her apart from my world, where a kimono was used only to scurry through the hall to the bathroom, or else to undress under before popping a nightgown over one’s head. Instantly she became my standard of what all actresses should look like. She was very pretty, with masses of curly reel hair and a white velvet complexion, which seemed to dismiss all outdoor, fresh-air existence. A lazy magic seemed to pervade her every move, and round and about her was an aroma of scented rice powder.

Later on in the days to come, everything she wore bedazzled me, and I knew it was just what an actress should wear. All of her dresses clung or else moved with a swish, suggesting, in a nice way, riotous frivolity in the underwear beneath. Her whole wardrobe bespoke a land of hope and promise, the antithesis of Wollaston clothes, which fell into two classifications, everyday and best, neither of which had any mystery at all.

Naturally I told Miss Elliott that I was going on the stage, and, to her credit, she neither laughed nor changed the subject. Apparently she took it seriously and advised me not to bother with any nonsense such as dramatic school, but to start acting right off, in a stock company, or a road company, or whatever company I could get myself into. She advised me to consider smart comedy, which was nice of her and optimistic as well, lor I was homely, plump, and wore a middy blouse which did not improve me.

Miss Elliott spoke as one who had seen everything come and go. She had been in a road company of A Pair of Sixes, playing the lead, and had followed somebody in the ingenue rôle of Nobody’s Widow, with Blanche Bates as the star. Miss Elliott gave me the feeling that t he theatre world was a mass of intrigue. She said she would have got. lots of other parts, but she looked too much like Billie Burke and Anne Murdock, who both had a lot of pull, so they had kept her out of New York because she was just their type, only younger. I was happy to hear that youth was in such demand, for it seemed to be the one thing which I had.

I did not see my actress friend for six months until she came to visit the Codys again, in their home at Dorchester, Massachusetts, where I called on her this glorious afternoon of January second. I cannot think why Miss Elliott ever put up with me even for these brief visits, unless it was that an actress must have an audience at all costs, and that the absolutely undivided attention of someone, no matter who it is, is a very satisfying thing.

Attending the Braintree Germans required something of the persistence and fortitude which my Pilgrim ancestors must have had. They too were willing to surmount any obstacle to get to wherever it was they wanted to go, even to landing in Plymouth Harbor, which my father said was the worst place they could have picked along the whole coast of Massachusetts Bay, for it was freezing in winter and broiling in summer and full of sand bars all the year round. Going to Braintree was full of sand bars, too, and it seems to me, looking back, that there must have been some dance somewhere or other which would have served the purpose just as well and still not have involved such effort. In the first place, to go out in the evening caused trouble with my father, who did not care for any alteration in the routine of our life. So, on the few evenings during the winter when I was invited to attend Miss Hayward’s paid Germans at Cochato Hall, Braintree, it meant flinging my father into one of his moods.

No matter how we tried to conceal it, my mother and I brought an eager undercurrent of excitement and rush to our usually stolid dinner table. It smacked of the great world and its doings, and my father wanted no trek with anyone, or even with anyone who knew anyone, who put on airs — and that was what Cochato Hall, and Germans, and rushing off in the dead of night at seven-thirty meant where my father was concerned. Dinner over, and dishes washed with the speed of chain lightning, my mother and I rushed upstairs to button and hook and snap each other into our best clothes. My slippers and fan and silk gloves in my dancingschool bag, an old pair of white cotton stockings pulled up over my good silk ones, scarfs tied round our heads, we would rush from the house, either with or without the benediction of a gruff good-bye or a flat statement from my irritated father. We ran down the block from Elmwood Avenue to Newport Avenue, my mother continually wondering what it was that we must have forgotten and listing, as she ran, everything I had on, to make sure that I did have it on. Round the corner of Newport Avenue, with three blocks to go until we came to Wollaston station. There we caught an evening train which rambled fitfully down to Hingham and the south shore of Massachusetts Ray.

Those red plush seats, as promising as the magic carpet of old, the frozen gray moonstone windowpanes, languorous tropical hissing steam heat, and a unique smell, blended of almost everything— an evening smell, perfume of the night, which I can remember to this day! Two or three other young people and their mothers would be going along too, and we all felt a great sense of hospitality and ownership in turning over the red plush seats and making the car our own as we rolled off into the night. Customarily in bed before the Tubular Rivet and Stud factory blew its whistle for the nine-o’clock curfew, we found this voyage into darkness almost too exciting to be endured.

At Braintree there was a short walk through the snow, and then at last our Mecca, Cochato Hall, with its warmth, bright lights weak pink lemonade and five o’clock tea biscuit, and the whole place practically full of fashionable Braintree people, with a small selection from Quincy. Wollaston had no society. We were the rag, tag, and bobtail on the fringe of the Great World’s train.

I wish I could remember John Porter, who was kind enough to see me home, but I can only remember things pertaining to him and I am afraid his good deed was eclipsed by the naughty world. His sister Marjorie wore a dress the color of June peas, trimmed round the neck and sleeves with black lace, and I resolved to have one like it. In life there are so few things which are permanent that it is encouraging to know that, although I never have had one, I still wish I had. And I remember that John Porter’s family were said to spend their summers at Swampscott, which my mother told me was very fashionable. And in all the eighteen years that I lived in Wollaston I never forgot one fashionable thing, place, person, or allusion.

January 3. — This morning I went up to Kay’s and coming home we met Clarke Boynton. I was so thrilled!! In the afternoon my sister Clare went back to Washington and I certainly hated to see her go because this is really her last vacation with us. She thinks she’ll get married in June. Kay and I went up to Butler’s Pond to go skating but the pond was all water so we talked for an hour with Dolly Blackmur and Winifred Marshall. John Porter came down in the afternoon but I was not at home.

To Clarke Boynton I shall always be indebted for the first grown-up compliment I ever received. He said that I had ‘a cute shape.’ He did not say it to me personally, but to my friend Gladys Bain. At least she said that he said it to her. My cars could hardly believe it at the time, and even now I scarcely know what to think. All my pictures of that period certainly belie the fact, and Clarke Boynton — who, by the way, had a cute shape himself—was very popular with the girls and could surely never have wasted so much as a fleeting glance on me. However, it opened up a new field of thought. I used to repeat the phrase over and over again, softly to myself, and, although steadfastly disbelieving it, I must say it gave me a good deal of simple pleasure. It helped to take up some of the slack of my spare time.

So Clarke colored my dreams, and yet I don’t think that in real life I ever said more to him than a shy hello, but I know that whenever I met him on the streets of our town I became so self-conscious that my normal gait suddenly changed to that, of some poor soul stricken with locomotor ataxia.

January 4. — I never saw it rain harder than today . . . a perfect hurricane, first with rain and then snow. In the morning I read and wrote letters and as long as the weather was so bad I didn’t go to church. Li the afternoon John Porter came down. lie is very nice, I think. I was mad to think I had my old dress on.

Letter writing was so serious a business with me that I kept my correspondence tabulated in a sort of bookkeeping style. I had a blank book, so that I could see just where I stood from day to day. One third of it was devoted to ‘Letters Answered,’ another third to ‘Letters Expected,’ and the last third to ‘People I am Going to Meet’ — ‘and lure into correspondence’ was what the last heading implied.

Writing letters was an inexpensive pleasure, and also it filled up a great hole in my leisure hours. It cost almost nothing, and I embraced it with zeal. Writing paper I bought at bargain sales, and the selection offered exactly suited my tastes, for very little plain white paper was ever marked down. The assortment was usually corn-colored, bright green, or heliotrope, and the brighter it was, the better I was pleased.

Then there were many inexpensive variations to letter writing which were delightful.

There was the novelty of commencing the letter on the back page and ending up with the finish where the beginning should have been. There was the period when it gave more zest to sign my name with the unusual spelling RYTHE. The use of green ink or red ink was always interesting, but best of all I liked sealing wax. It had a cachet of elegance and cost only five cents a stick. And there was that glorious moment of choosing what color to use; and in a house where one took what he could get cheapest and learned to like it afterwards, by a process of will power, any choice whatsoever was a tonic to one’s soul.

After a period I had scraped together fourteen different colors. Wonderful to use, and wonderful just to look at. I remember showing my sister the whole fourteen sticks arranged beautifully on the lid of a box, with a careful eye to the color scheme. Naturally it was quite a temptation to her and she selfishly asked me for one, whereupon, much alarmed, I withdrew the whole collection abruptly, and all fourteen sticks fell off the box lid and broke into many pieces on the floor. To this day I think my sister laughed far too much.

January 5. — Nothing exciting happened at school today excepting that I got Good plus in a Latin sight translation— the highest in the class. But this afternoon I went in town and did some shopping and then I went up to the Castle Square Theatre. I was quite seared because a man on Tremont Street pinched me and said, ‘Helloa, dear.’ I went into Miss Doris Olsson’s dressing room while she dressed and of course I had a wonderful time. I am certainly the happiest thing! She says that she is positive that she can get me a position at the Castle Square Theatre next fall to take child parts. She’s going to speak to Mr. John Craig about it and then I am to go to her apartment next week.

Miss Doris Olsson was the leading lady of John Craig’s Castle Square Theatre Stock Company, an organization so permanent and so enthusiastically supported that it might well have been classified as a Boston habit. Performances every night except Sunday, a daily matinee, and a different play each week. Such was its leisurely clip, and it is remarkable that Miss Doris Olsson, with so much of her time bespoken, ever troubled to read any of her letters, let alone answer them, especially one so inconsequential as mine. I had written to ask her for information about the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where the papers said that she had once been a student.

At this point in my life the question uppermost in my mind was how to get to be an actress. Of course I had heard of Boston’s own Emerson School of Oratory, and also the Curry School of Expression, but those names did not soar with my fancy. The Emerson School of Oratory and the Curry School of Expression smacked of elocution and safety, and what I longed for was the razzle-dazzle of wild Broadway. I remember telling people — not my family, of course — that after I had finished with high school I meant to go to New York and ‘be fast.’ I had no particular recipe for this, but I thought having a good time would take care of most of the ingredients, topped off by my automatically looking quite dashing, something along Merry Widow lines; and, for sauce and good measure, I meant to ‘astonish people.’ The latter item was planned very kindly on my part, as a sort of missionary work in reverse, for the news which seeped back to Wollaston about her people who had drifted away held very little astonishment and could hardly even be classified as news. And so, for everyone’s sake, off to New York I must go, and once I heard the name ‘American Academy of Dramatic Arts’ I felt instantly that this was something like.

Miss Olsson’s kind heart prompted her to write me that the school was a very good one, and that if I would call on her in her dressing room after a matinee she could tell me about it in more detail. It seemed that not only New York, but even people connected with the place, bred astonishment from the word ‘go,’ for who in all his born days could imagine that our dowdy postman, Mr. Mullins, would ever drop such a bombshell of magic into our rusty old letter box! I, the child of Annie and Clinton Jones, senior student at Quincy High School, member of the Wollaston Unitarian Church, treasurer of the Lend-a-Hand Society, Ruth Gordon Jones — who, indeed, could ever have foreseen that one dazzling day I should walk out of the front door of 14 Elmwood Avenue and wind up sometime later at the heady heights of the Castle Square Theatre’s stage entrance!

Those were not the days when autograph hunters clogged the alley to meet the star and jostle her into submission to get her signature, sometimes tearing off bits of her clothes in the fray. To me — and I think the feeling was general among stage-struck youngsters — actors and actresses were so godlike that I should never have dared to hang about and spy on them personally. If they crossed one’s path, that was different, and then it was permissible, in this world of good manners, to rush after them and gaze awestruck from afar. I can remember a rather fast run up Tremont Street to see Miss Jose Collins, star of The Merry Countess, and so beautiful that she was worth a good run. And once again Fortune smiled upon me fairly when I saw a sign in Slattery and Company’s show window announcing that Miss Violet Heming was within, selling Red Cross Christmas seals. By a hasty bit of furtive bookkeeping I managed to scrape up a quarter, and went in and bought some from her, for which she thanked me. I heard her, and my friend Katherine Follett heard her, too. Miss Violet Heming, leading lady for Mr. George Arliss, in Disraeli, had said ‘Thank you’ to Ruth Gordon Jones. So now there were three actresses with whom I had had something approaching personal contact — these two, and Miss Alice Claire Elliott.

After the receipt of Miss Olsson’s letter joy reigned supreme, only slightly marred by a fly in the ointment in the person of my usually tractable mother, to whom this letter did not bring quite so much pleasure as it did to me. My mother was cautious, and also prone to horror stories that looked at life darkly and leaned to the seamy side: stories of how a darky had once chased her right out of a cemetery in Bainbridge, Georgia, and how on another occasion — this time, impartially enough, in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts — a diabolical footpad had slashed her handbag containing Grandma’s amethysts right off her wrist, with her own sister not two steps ahead. My mother’s mind ran to the imaginative, and she was forever warning me not to speak to strangers, no matter how much I was tempted, and never, never to accept candy from them, for sometimes it was poisoned and always it was a trick. Also, women were worse than men! And now here, writing me a letter, was a woman, a stranger, and an actress as well. Gracious only knew what ulterior motives might be behind all this!

My mother said firmly that if I went to the Castle Square Theatre she must go too. She said that it was in the worst part of Boston. There were several districts which she used to describe this way, but on that day Castle Square took precedence. She said that girls could disappear and never be seen again, and added horrid implications about the South American Trade. She said that I might think that I was going through a door into Miss Olsson’s dressing room, when all the time somebody wicked was very cleverly misdirecting me and with one shove I should end up a prisoner in some squalid cellar, later to be herded off to Rio, where Papa had been. She said that this happened every day, and when I asked her what she would do to save me if it did happen, she said that she could scream.

I must say that I had a very hard time with my mother, but after considerable badgering she finally weakened and agreed to see me safely through the door of Miss Olsson’s dressing room, and then leave it to fate to get me home intact, by some shorter route than via Rio. This was not much of a concession, but it was the best that I could get. Go she would, and go she did, and perhaps it was all for the best, for even she had to admit that the stage entrance of the Castle Square Theatre seemed in every way as circumspect as our own back door.

All that I can now remember of the visit itself is my mother and I standing in a dark hallway, my heart thumping louder than the Last Trump. After a nervous knock, the door of Miss Olsson’s dressing room opened into brightness, and those bright lights might just as well have been the first stop on my way to Rio, for all I knew what was going on. I didn’t, even know when my mother left me. I don’t think I saw Miss Olsson or the dressing room, and so when I left there I was as ignorant of what backstage looked like as I had been when I came in. But somewhere through the haze my senses were restored long enough to hear Miss Olsson say that instead of my going off to dramatic school she would arrange an interview with Mr. John Craig, the Ruler over this domain, and perhaps I might get to play small parts there.

With that I wafted out, back to the South Station, and semiconsciously boarded the Wollaston train. Dreamily I ended up at our supper table, eating everyday meat and potatoes and wondering if perhaps Mr. Craig would want me at almost any minute. Possibly he might not, even permit me to finish out the school week. How the news would rock Quincy! How sad my school would be to see me go! I should always remember to be kind to my classmates, even if I became as famous as I naturally intended to be.

All the other days of my life seemed to have slipped away from me, and I started newborn from that afternoon — newborn an adult, fully armed for the fray as though I had sprung straight from one of Cadmus’s teeth. I thought of how recently I had been a child. Only that afternoon I had been scared because a man on Tremont Street had pinched me. The world, which seemed so uncertain only a few hours back, was now solved, settled, and simple, and, like Chicken Little, I was about to wander out and see Life!

(To be continued)