You will say good-by to mother’s petting; you will live in your trunk.  The time will come when that poor hotel trunk (so called to distinguish it from the trunk that goes to the theatre, when you are travelling or en route), with its dents and scars, will be the only friendly object to greet you in your desolate boarding-house, with its one wizened, unwilling gas-burner, and its outlook upon back yards and cats, or roofs and sparrows, its sullen, hard-featured bed, its despairing carpet; for you see, you will not have the money that might take you to the front of the house and four burners.  Rain or shine, you will have to make your lonely, often frightened way to and from the theatre.  At rehearsals you will have to stand about, wearily waiting hours while others rehearse over and over again their more important scenes; yet you may not leave for a walk or a chat, for you do not know at what moment your scene may be called.  You will not be made much of.  You will receive a “Good morning” or “Good evening” from the company, probably nothing more.  If you are travelling, you will literally live in your hat and cloak.  You will breakfast in them many and many a time, you will dine in them regularly, that you may rise at once and go to the theatre or car.  You will see no one, go nowhere.

If you are in earnest, you will simply endure the first year,—­endure and study,—­and all for what?  That, after dressing in the corner farthest from the looking-glass, in a dismal room you would scarcely use for your housemaid’s brooms and dusters at home, you may stand for a few moments in the background of some scene, and watch the leading lady making the hit in the foreground.  Will these few, well-dressed, well-lighted, music-thrilled moments repay you for the loss of home love, home comfort, home stardom?

To that bright, energetic girl, just home from school, overeducated, perhaps, with nothing to do, restless,—­forgive me,—­vain, who wants to go upon the stage, let me say:  “Pause a moment, my dear, in your comfortable home, and think of the unemployed actresses who are suffering from actual want.  Is there one among you, who, if you had the chance, would care to strike the bread from the hand of one of these?  Ask God that the scales of unconscious selfishness may fall from your eyes.  Look about you and see if there is not some duty, however small, the more irksome the better, that you may take from your mother’s daily load, some service you can render for father, brother, sister, aunt; some daily household task, so small you may feel contemptuous of it, yet some one must do it, and it may be a special thorn in that some one’s side.  So surely as you force yourself to do the small things nearest your hand, so surely will you be called upon for greater service.”

And oh! my dears, my dears, a loving mother’s declaration, “I don’t know what I should do without my daughter,” is sweeter and more precious than the careless applause of strangers.  Try, then, to be patient; find some occupation, if it is nothing more than the weekly putting in order of bureau drawers for some unusually careless member of the family; and, having a good home, thank God and your parents, and stay in it.