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But it was only after more than an hour's practice that she moved him to say: "That'll do for a beginning. Now, we'll sing." She tried "Suwanee River" first and went through it fairly well, singing to him as he stood back at the rear door. He was enthusiastic cunning Burlingham, who knew so well how to get the best out of everyone! "Mighty good eh, Pat? Yes, mighty good.
But she watched Burlingham shifting the slides and altering the forms of the lenses, and was in another way as much thrilled and spellbound as by the acting. Nor did the spell vanish when, with the audience gone, they all sat down to a late supper, and made coarse jests and mocked at their own doings and at the people who had applauded. Susan did not hear.
He exonerated the girl, but not Burlingham. He was convinced that the manager, in a spirit of mean revenge, had put up a job on him. It simply could not be in the ordinary course that any audience, without some sly trickery of prompting from an old expert of theatrical "double-crossing," would be impatient for a mere chit of an amateur when it might listen to his rich, mellow eloquence.
And nothing that might befall could equal what she had suffered in the throes of the casting out. Burlingham roused her from her long reverie. He evidently had come straight from his nap stocking feet, shirt open at the collar, trousers sagging and face shiny with the sweat that accumulates during sleep on a hot day. "Round that bend ahead of us is Sutherland," said he, pointing forward.
Susan had a menu in her hand and as he ordered she noted the prices. She was dazzled by his extravagance dazzled and frightened and, in a curious, vague, unnerving way, fascinated. Money the thing she must have for Burlingham in whose case "everything depended on the nursing."
And what was sin, the supreme sin, but weakness? It was exactly as Burlingham had explained. He had said that, whether for good or for evil, really to live one must be strong. Strong! What a good teacher he had been one of the rare kind that not only said things interestingly but also said them so that you never forgot. How badly she had learned!
I'd kill myself before I'd spend another day with the man they made me marry." "Well I'm not fond of dying," observed Burlingham, in the light, jovial tone that would most quickly soothe her agitation, "but I think I'd take my chances with the worms rather than with the dry rot of a backwoods farm. You may not get your meals so regular out in the world, but you certainly do live.
And then Alan proceeded to expound his views on the matter of sanitary authorities in general and of those of Burlingham in particular, to which Felicia listened with absorbing attention and Elisabeth did not listen at all.
BURLINGHAM had lived too long, too actively, and too intelligently to have left any of his large, original stock of the optimism that had so often shipwrecked his career in spite of his talents and his energy. Out of the bitterness of experience he used to say, "A young optimist is a young fool. An old optimist is an old ass. A fool may learn, an ass can't."
Susan nodded delightedly. She did not know and the others did not at the excited moment recall that the company was to date eleven dollars less well off than when it started from the headwaters of the Ohio in early June. But Burlingham knew, and that was the cause of the quiet grin to which he treated himself.
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