“I will never do that.”
She shrugged. After dinner she took me to a night school where she
posed, as she said she wished me to see how it was done. Of course, I
had already seen Lil Markey pose for the Count, but she was just an
amateur model then. It did seem worse to me, moreover, to go out there
before a whole class than before one man. Miss St. Denis seemed
surprised when I said that, and she declared it was quite the other way.
That night I sat in my little narrow bedroom and looked out of the
window, and I thought of all I had learned that day, and it seemed
clear to me that Mr. Sands was right. There was little chance of my
making a living as an artist in Boston. What was to become of me then?
Should I return home? The thought of doing that made me clinch my hands
passionately together and cry to myself:
“No, no; never, never!”
I remembered something Mr. Davis had said to me when he was teaching me
to act. He said that I should forget my own personality and try to
imagine myself the person I was playing. Why should I not do this as a
model? I resolved to try it. It could not be so bad, since Mr. Sands had
recommended it. Yes, I would do it! I would be a model! But I should not
tell them at home. They would not understand, and I did not want to
disgrace them.
With the resolve came first a sense of calmness, and then suddenly a
rush of rage against Reggie who had driven me to this. I had the small
town English girl’s foolish contempt for a work I really had no reason
for despising. As the daughter of an artist, and, as I thought, an
artist myself, it seemed to me, I was signing the death warrant of my
best ambitions and, as I have said, I felt, with rage, that Reggie was
to blame for this. I looked out of that window, and lifting up my eyes
and clasped hands to the skies, I called:
[Illustration: “Oh, God in Heaven, hear me, and if I ever go back to
Reggie, curse me, and may all kinds of ills come upon me. Amen.”]
“O God in heaven! hear me, and if ever I go back to Reggie, curse me,
and may all kinds of ills come upon me. Amen!”
Now, I thought, as I got into that folding bed, “I don’t dare to go
back, for God will curse me if I do.”