"What have _you_ to say to me, papa? I am a fool to mind what a schoolgirl says." "I don't know that I have anything to say," he observed, calmly. "You know your own feelings best." And then he regarded her attentively. "I suppose when you marry you will give up the stage." "I suppose so," she said, in a low voice. "I should doubt," he said, with quite a dispassionate air, "your being able to play one part for a lifetime. You might get tired--and that would be awkward for your husband and yourself. I don't say anything about your giving up all your prospects, although I had great pride in you and a still greater hope. That is for your own consideration. If you think you will be happier--if you are sure you will have no regret--if, as I say, you think you can play the one part for a lifetime--well and good." "And you are right," she said, bitterly, "to speak of me as an actress, and not as a human being. I must be playing a part to the end, I suppose. Perhaps so. Well, I hope I shall please my smaller audience as well as I seem to have pleased the bigger one." Then she altered her tone. "I told you, papa, the other day of my having seen that child run over and brought back to the woman who was standing on the pavement." "Yes," said he; but wondering why this incident should be referred to at such a moment. "I did not tell you the truth--at least the whole truth. When I walked away, what was I thinking of? I caught myself trying to recall the way in which the woman threw her arms up when she saw the dead body of her child, and I was wondering whether I could repeat it. And then I began to wonder whether I was a devil--or a woman." "Bah!" said he. "That is a craze you have at present. You have had fifty others before. What I am afraid of is that, at the instigation of some such temporary fad, you will take a step that you will find irrevocable. Just think it over, Gerty. If you leave the stage, you will destroy many a hope I had formed; but that doesn't matter. Whatever is most for your happiness--that is the only point." "And so you have given me your congratulations, papa," she said, rising. "I have been so thoroughly trained to be an actress that, when I marry, I shall only go from one stage to another." "That was only a figure of speech," said he. "At all events," she said, "I shall not be vexed by petty jealousies of other actresses, and I shall cease to be worried and humiliated by what they say about me in the provincial newspapers." "As for the newspapers," he retorted, "you have little to complain of. They have treated _you_ very well. And even if they annoyed you by a phrase here or there, surely the remedy is simple. You need not read them. You don't require any recommendation to the public now. As for your jealousy of other actresses--that was always an unreasonable vexation on your part--" "Yes, and that only made it the more humiliating to myself," said she, quickly.