"I claim no credit to myself--young as I was, placed as I was between
the easy life of Vice and the hard life of Virtue--for acting as I did.
The man simply horrified me: my natural impulse was to escape from him.
But let it be remembered, before I approach the saddest part of my
sad story, that I was an innocent girl, and that I was at least not to
blame.
"Forgive me for dwelling as I have done on my early years. I shrink from
speaking of the events that are still to come.
"In losing the esteem of my first benefactress, I had, in my friendless
position, lost all hold on an honest life--except the one frail hold
of needle-work. The only reference of which I could now dispose was the
recommendation of me by my landlady to a place of business which largely
employed expert needle-women. It is needless for me to tell you how
miserably work of that sort is remunerated: you have read about it in
the newspapers. As long as my health lasted I contrived to live and to
keep out of debt. Few girls could have resisted as long as I did
the slowly-poisoning influences of crowded work-room, insufficient
nourishment, and almost total privation of exercise. My life as a
child had been a life in the open air: it had helped to strengthen
a constitution naturally hardy, naturally free from all taint of
hereditary disease. But my time came at last. Under the cruel stress
laid on it my health gave way. I was struck down by low fever, and
sentence was pronounced on me by my fellow-lodgers: 'Ah, poor thing,
_her_ troubles will soon be at an end!' "The prediction might have proved true--I might never have committed the
errors and endured the sufferings of after years--if I had fallen ill in
another house.
"But it was my good, or my evil, fortune--I dare not say which--to have
interested in myself and my sorrows an actress at a suburban theatre,
who occupied the room under mine. Except when her stage duties took her
away for two or three hours in the evening, this noble creature
never left my bedside. Ill as she could afford it, her purse paid my
inevitable expenses while I lay helpless. The landlady, moved by her
example, accepted half the weekly rent of my room. The doctor, with the
Christian kindness of his profession, would take no fees. All that the
tenderest care could accomplish was lavished on me; my youth and my
constitution did the rest. I struggled back to life--and then I took up
my needle again.
"It may surprise you that I should have failed (having an actress for my
dearest friend) to use the means of introduction thus offered to me to
try the stage--especially as my childish training had given me, in some
small degree, a familiarity with the Art.