Carrie did not understand this last.  All the rest showed her that her comedy success was little or nothing.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Why, just this.  You have this quality in your eyes and mouth and in your nature.  You can lose it, you know.  If you turn away from it and live to satisfy yourself alone, it will go fast enough.  The look will leave your eyes.  Your mouth will change.  Your power to act will disappear.  You may think they won’t, but they will.  Nature takes care of that.”

He was so interested in forwarding all good causes that he sometimes became enthusiastic, giving vent to these preachments.  Something in Carrie appealed to him.  He wanted to stir her up.

“I know,” she said, absently, feeling slightly guilty of neglect.

“If I were you,” he said, “I’d change.”

The effect of this was like roiling helpless waters.  Carrie troubled over it in her rocking-chair for days.

“I don’t believe I’ll stay in comedy so very much longer,” she eventually remarked to Lola.

“Oh, why not?” said the latter.

“I think,” she said, “I can do better in a serious play.”

“What put that idea in your head?”

“Oh, nothing,” she answered; “I’ve always thought so.”

Still, she did nothing—­grieving.  It was a long way to this better thing—­or seemed so—­and comfort was about her; hence the inactivity and longing.

Chapter XLVII

THE WAY OF THE BEATEN—­A HARP IN THE WIND

In the city, at that time, there were a number of charities similar in nature to that of the captain’s, which Hurstwood now patronized in a like unfortunate way.  One was a convent mission-house of the Sisters of Mercy in Fifteenth Street—­a row of red brick family dwellings, before the door of which hung a plain wooden contribution box, on which was painted the statement that every noon a meal was given free to all those who might apply and ask for aid.  This simple announcement was modest in the extreme, covering, as it did, a charity so broad.  Institutions and charities are so large and so numerous in New York that such things as this are not often noticed by the more comfortably situated.  But to one whose mind is upon the matter, they grow exceedingly under inspection.  Unless one were looking up this matter in particular, he could have stood at Sixth Avenue and Fifteenth Street for days around the noon hour and never have noticed that out of the vast crowd that surged along that busy thoroughfare there turned out, every few seconds, some weather-beaten, heavy-footed specimen of humanity, gaunt in countenance and dilapidated in the matter of clothes.  The fact is none the less true, however, and the colder the day the more apparent it became.  Space and a lack of culinary room in the mission-house, compelled an arrangement which permitted of only twenty-five or thirty eating