"Do you realize, Pauline, that if I don't get an engagement soon I shan't be able to pay my board?" "Oh, you poor dear!" She came over and took my hand. I don't know why women like Pauline do that, but when they do it it is a sign they are not equal to the situation and are trying to fake it with you. "I know it is hard"--she found the cooing note with facility--"but it will come right; it always does. I've always found that there is a way provided." Something flashed into my mind that I had read in the newspapers recently about the corporations Henry worked for, and I wondered if Pauline had the least notion how the way, for her, was humanly provided, but the sound of Henry's latchkey put an end to the conversation, which I hadn't felt sufficiently encouraging to warrant my taking up again. I went from Pauline's, at the very first opportunity, to Sarah Croyden, who was playing in Chicago, and doing her kindliest to blow the wind of hope into my sagging sails. I met Cecelia Brune there. It had been to me the witness of how far I had fallen from my mark, that I had been thrown with her again in my last engagement. Hers was the sort of talent that Cline and Erskine could play up to the limit of the inadmissible. There were not wanting intimations that Cecelia had moved her own limit a notch or two in that direction. She had taken a characteristic view of my reappearance in her neighbourhood. "Got into the band-wagon, didn't you?" she remarked. "I saw Dean on the road last year and she said you was going in for high-brow stunts. Nothin' to it. You stay with Cline and Erskine; they get you on like anything." Her own notion of getting on was to figure as the sole female attraction in a song and dance skit in what she pronounced "Vawdville." "It's the only place havin' a figgur does you any good!" That she did not recommend it for me must be taken for her estimate of mine. Nevertheless I was amused by her, and Sarah, I knew, was even a little fond. Sarah's affections were a sort of natural emanation from her, like the rays of a candle, and warmed all they lighted on. On this afternoon I found Cecelia drinking tea there and I wasn't able to conceal my professional depression from her sharp, shallow inquisitiveness. There were never two or three players got together, I believe, but the talk turned on the comparative ineffectiveness of Merit as against Pull in the struggle for success.