THE LUCK OF THE IRISH
and she became all his ambitions in one. His own peculiar genius had fired hers, even when she was a child, unconscious of what was stirring within. He drew wonderful pictures for her. At the end of the road were wealth and fame.
To possess genius and yet to fail in attainment because of a trifling physical defect called nerves! She could not play before an audience; she could not even accompany a singer with any success. Yet, in a manager's office, all the yearning, all the poetry and romance in her soul, flooded her finger-tips. To hear the applause of the multitudes, to walk and live among the great, to be indeed one of them, to taste the sweetest fruit in life, real success! In the manager's office, prior to her last and complete failure, she met Norton Colburton.
Meantime, during her trials, she had tried clerkship in the big shops, given music-lessons, and by qualification and the assistance of her fathers late confrères she had eventually obtained a post in a public school, hating the work, yet sticking to it doggedly, as it meant not only financial independence, but personal liberty.
All these broken pictures passed through her mind as the shiffle-shuffle of the horse died away—old, bent, gray, wrinkled, the political mother of an endless stream of noisy, restless children. All these years of drudgery for what? Food, clothes, roof—little else! But what were twenty or thirty years of drudgery if, among them, there were three or four into which all the luxuries
279
