That I was able to go on loving him was, I suppose, the reason why the
shock I had sustained left no regrettable mark upon my career. The mark
it left on me was none other than work is supposed to leave on every
woman. What I am sure of now is that it is not work, but the loss of
love that leaves her impoverished of feminine graces. I grew barren of
manner and was reputed to be entirely absorbed in my profession. It was
not however, that I had excluded the more human interests, but they had
taken flight. All the forces of my being had been by the shock of loss,
dropped into some subterranean pit, where they ran on underground and
watered the choicest product of my art. If I had married Helmeth
Garrett, I might have grown insensible to him, as it was I seemed to
have been fixed, though by pain, in the fruitful relation. The loss of
him, the desperate ache, the start of memory, are just as good materials
to build an artistic success upon as the joy of having. And I did build.
I gathered up and wrought into the structure of my life the pain of
loving as well as its delight. I am a successful actress. Whatever else
has happened to me, I am at least a success.
I never saw him again. I never saw Henry and Pauline Mills but once, and
some bitterness in the occasion, came near to driving me toward that pit
into which Pauline was willing to believe I had already descended. It
was the second season after I had parted from her in Chicago, that some
sort of brokers' convention had brought Henry on to New York and Pauline
with him, and to the same hotel where Mark Eversley was shut up with an
attack of bronchitis. Jerry and I, going up to call on him, came face to
face with them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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