"Yes, tell me," Paula said faintly, bringing her a cup of coffee. "I was first smitten with the passion to act--a gawky girl of ten at a child's party," Selma began. "I was speaking a piece when the impulse came to turn loose. It may have been because I was so homely and straight-haired, or it may have been that I did the verses so differently from the ordinary routine of speaking pieces--anyway, a boy in the room laughed. Another boy immediately bored in upon the scoffer, downed his enemy and was endeavoring hopefully to kill him with bare hands, when I interfered. My champion and I walked home together and left a wailing and disordered company. That's the first brush. "My home was Danube, Kentucky. They had a dramatic society there. Eight years after the child's party, this dramatic society gave _A Tribute to Art_. Where the piece came from is forgotten. How it got its name never was known outside of the sorry brain that thrust it, deformed but palpitating, upon the world. Mrs. Fiske couldn't have made other than a stick of the heroine. The hero was larger timber, though too dead for vine leaves. But, I think I told you about the Big Sister--put there in blindness or by budding genius. There were possibilities in that character. Danube didn't know it, or it wouldn't have fallen to me. Indeed, I remember toward the end of the piece--a real moment of windy gloom and falling leaves, a black-windowed farmhouse on the left, the rest a desolate horizon--in such a moment the Big Sister plucks out her heart to show its running death. "I had persisted in dramatic work, in and out of season, during those eight years, but it really was because the Big Sister didn't need to be beautiful that I got the part. I wove the lines tighter and sharpened the thing in rehearsals, until the rest of the cast became afraid, not that I would outshine them, but that I might disgrace the society on the night o' nights. You see, I was only just tolerated. Poor father, he wasn't accounted much in Danube, and there was a raft of us. Poor, dear man! "Danube wasn't big enough to attract real shows, so the visiting drama gave expression to limited trains, trap-doors, blank cartridges and falling cliffs"--Selma Cross chuckled expansively at the memory--"and I plunged my fellow-townsmen into waters deeper and stormier than _Nobody's Claim_ or _Shadows of a Great City_. Wasn't it monstrous?" Paula inclined her head, but was not given time to answer.