Mark sat down on the floor and thought. His thoughts went slowly across the track of six weeks. He plodded. For all its demerits this red and gold theatre was thrilling. People were jolly, kind enough. The lewd stagehands had let him help set a scene tonight. The man who handled the lights had shown him how they were turned on and off to make stormy waverings. Cora was exciting. Winter at home was plagued by Aunt Edith who came out from Trenton to spend the cold months at the farm and who lectured Mark’s father on Methodism. And here was this easy, good job. If he worked hard it might be that Mr. Carlson--who wasn’t now the screaming beast of rehearsals--would let him run the lights instead of acting. Mark said, “Well, no. Just as soon stay here, I guess.” “How old are you, sonny?” “Goin’ on seventeen, sir.” “I’ll give you forty a week to stay here,” said Carlson, “Fitch tells me you think acting’s pretty easy.” “I don’t see any trick to acting,” Mark mused, absorbing the offer of forty dollars a week, “There ain’t nothin’ to it but speakin’ out loud.... Yes, I’d like to stay here.” He wanted to show himself useful and got up, pointing to the bulbs clustered on the ceiling in a bed of tin, “I should think you’d ought to save money if you had them down here by the lookin’ glasses instead of this gas, y’see? The fellers don’t get any good of the electric light while they’re puttin’ paint on, and--” “Rehearsal at ten in the morning,” said Carlson, “Good-night.” Marked gaped at the black and empty door. Then his homesickness swelled up and he sighed, squeezing the sponge. His body trembled drearily. He lowered his head as does a lonesome calf turned into strange pastures. II He Progresses “Nicoline” lasted until April, 1896. Mark played the country boy in “Mr. Bell” all the next season and, duly coached by Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, figured as the young duke in “The Princess of Croy” when Carlson imported that disaster in the autumn of 1897. Its failure afflicted Mark less than his private griefs. He played for four months in Carlson’s Boston stock company. This was penible. He had never been so far from his adored family. True, freed of Cora, he could send ten or twenty dollars a week to his father but he missed Sundays in Fayettesville and the Boston wind gave him chilblains. The friendly women of the Stock Company found him shy and here began the legend of Mark’s misogyny. He read novels and tramped about Boston, surveyed the theatrical setting of Louisburg Square and sidelong admired the ladies walking rigidly in sober hats on Commonwealth Avenue. Such persons, he mused, would never fling hot curling irons in a husband’s face and it wasn’t possible to imagine them smoking cigarettes in bed. But he hated Boston and the war was welcome as it honourably pulled him back to a New Jersey Infantry regiment.