My Actor-Husband: A true story of American stage life

he act of folding a garment, and smile at me in approval. Then his arm would steal around my shoulders and he would pat me tenderly.... I would turn away, pretending to busy myse

refurbishing the old and making new ones, and sometimes Will would lend a hand and run the machine over the thick seams.... I once read that the women of the Commune wove the initials of those they hated into their knitt

eneath my head, which lay pressed against his breast, only then did I give way to my grief. I

t my face and smooth back my hair, as one soothes a sorrowing child. At

ach other. I had been in New York only once before, and the thought of living in the great city, of becoming an integral part of it, made me thrill with excitement. Will and I stood on the front of the ferry-boat and watched the panorama; he pointed out the various tall buildings with an air of familiarity. When we passed close to a great

tage and its people. Though I was not yet a "really truly" actress, the fact that Will had met me "in the profession" would have prejudiced them against me; added to this was the fact that Will, himself a tyro, taking a wife at the very threshold of his career would not be looked at through our love-coloured glasses. The effect my marriage might have upon my own relatives never troubled me; my father and mother belonged to that great class of incompetent parenthood which brings children into the world without any actual love for them. Never questioning their fitness for child-rearing, they divine

nocking"; their easy disregard of the conventions, especially between the sexes; a bombastic retailing of their own exploits, as "how I jumped on and saved the show, with only one rehearsal"; talking "shop" to the exclusion of every other subject in the world. I overheard one of the actresses at the next table say we were "very up-stage," which

rge as the pantry in our house at home; and the furnishings-! The whole outfit might have been removed from a Seventh Avenue show-window, where they advertise "Complete furnished apartment for $49.99." The near-gold-leaf chairs were so frail that one was afraid to sit upon them. The general atmosphere of the parlor reminded me of the stage-settings one comes across in one-night-stand theatres. However, the vistas of the trees and flowers decided the momentous question. We paid a month's rent, then and there; it made a terrible hole in our last and only fifty-dollar bill, b

ding on a sloping bottom, in danger of falling out of the kitchen window if one leaned too much to the right, or of toppling over to the

d he regarded it as so much experience. Several times a week we donned our best clothes and made the rounds of the theatrical employment agencies. Will had had several offers during the summer, but we wanted a joint engagement; we had promised each other, when we married, that nothing should cause us to be separat

ong as you're together, but you can't be together. The chances are against it-you may be lucky enough to get a joint engagement one season, but the next season you're off on the road, while she's playing in New York or in another part of the country. And what does this separation lead to in the end? You're a human bei

separation hung over me like a pall. Will tried to reassure me by saying it was still early, and that we would hold out.... I believed what he said with a child-like faith. Indeed, I am not so sure that in these days I did not worship Will with the same idolatry that I offered up to the Virgin Mary.... The whole world had merged into one being-my husband. My love for my husband was the absorbing passion of my life. Never happy in my home-my fat

, late in the summer, when the theatres along Broadway had begun to remove the signboards from their entrances-it came. I knew something had happened when Will opened the door. Instead of kissing me at once, as was his habit, he passed on to the bedroom

gripped me. We looked into each other's eyes.... After a while I managed to say, "Well, dear?" ... and when he replied

uckingham in Richard, and, if we do the Merchant, I'll be cast for Gratiano.... The best thing about it is the possibility of coming into New York for a

at being cheerful. We understood each other's silence ... and respected it. Outside the r

ring the cue spoken, to realize that one is but half-dressed, or, again, to rush upon the scene only to find the lines obliterated from one's memory.... When I awoke, I heard Will in the kitchen; there was the smell of

in a cheap glass vase on the mantle; Will had bought them from a street vendor that morning when he went out for the papers. He had pinned one in my