My mother, with the circumspection that belongs to mothers, told me that he was only flirting, and that I had better turn my attention to somebody else.  Somebody else!  As if any one were worth even looking at after Jack Curtis.  I pitied every girl who was not engaged to him.  How could my sisters be happy?  Resigned, content, they might be; but to be married and done for, and afterwards to meet Jack—­well, imagination failed me to depict the awfulness of such a calamity.

It was quite time he spoke—­there can be no doubt of that; although Jack Curtis was too charming to be bound by the rules which govern ordinary mortals.  Still, I could not help feeling uneasy and apprehensive.  How could I tell how he carried on at those gay and festive scenes in which I was not included?  A proud earl’s lovely daughter might be yearning to bestow her hand upon him.  A duchess might have marked him for her own.  Possibly my jealous fears exaggerated the importance of the society in which he moved, but it seemed to me that if Jack had been bidden to a friendly dinner at Buckingham Palace it was only what might be expected.

Well, there came a night when we expected Jack to supper and he appeared not.  Only, in his place, a few lines to say that he was going to start at once for his holiday.  A friend had just invited him to join him on his yacht.  He added in a postscript:  “I will write later.”  He did not write.  Hours, days, weeks passed, and not a word did we hear.  “It is a break-off,” said my mother consolingly.  “He had got tired of us all, and he thought this the easiest way of letting us know.  I told you there was an understanding between him and Isabel Chisholm—­any one could see that with half an eye.”

I turned away shuddering.

“Terrible gales,” said my father, rustling the newspaper comfortably in his easy chair.  “Great disasters among the shipping.  I shouldn’t wonder if the yacht young what’s-his-name went out in were come to grief.”

I grew pale, and thin, and dispirited.  I knew the ladies of our company made nasty remarks about me.  One day I overheard two of them talking.

“She never was much of an actress, and now she merely walks through her part.  They never had any feeling for art, not one of those Gascoigne girls.”

No feeling for art!  What a low, mean, spiteful, wicked thing to say.  And the worst of it was that it was so true.

I resolved at once that I would do something desperate.  The last piece brought out at our theatre had been a “frost.”  It had dragged along until the advertisements were able to announce “Fifteenth Night of the Great Realistic Drama.”  And various scathing paragraphs from the papers were pruned down and weeded till they seemed unstinted praise.  Thus:  “It was not the fault of the management that the new play was so far from being a triumphant success,” was cut down to one modest sentence, “A triumphant success.”  “A few enthusiastic cheers from personal friends alone broke the ominous silence when the curtain fell,” became briefly “Enthusiastic cheers.”