Chapter XL A PUBLIC DISSENSION—­A FINAL APPEAL

There was no after-theatre lark, however, so far as Carrie was concerned.  She made her way homeward, thinking about her absence.  Hurstwood was asleep, but roused up to look as she passed through to her own bed.

“Is that you?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

The next morning at breakfast she felt like apologizing.

“I couldn’t get home last evening,” she said.

“Ah, Carrie,” he answered, “what’s the use saying that?  I don’t care.  You needn’t tell me that, though.”

“I couldn’t,” said Carrie, her color rising.  Then, seeing that he looked as if he said “I know,” she exclaimed:  “Oh, all right.  I don’t care.”

>From now on, her indifference to the flat was even greater.  There seemed no common ground on which they could talk to one another.  She let herself be asked for expenses.  It became so with him that he hated to do it.  He preferred standing off the butcher and baker.  He ran up a grocery bill of sixteen dollars with Oeslogge, laying in a supply of staple articles, so that they would not have to buy any of those things for some time to come.  Then he changed his grocery.  It was the same with the butcher and several others.  Carrie never heard anything of this directly from him.  He asked for such as he could expect, drifting farther and farther into a situation which could have but one ending.

In this fashion, September went by.

“Isn’t Mr. Drake going to open his hotel?” Carrie asked several times.

“Yes.  He won’t do it before October, though, now.”

Carrie became disgusted.  “Such a man,” she said to herself frequently.  More and more she visited.  She put most of her spare money in clothes, which, after all, was not an astonishing amount.  At last the opera she was with announced its departure within four weeks.  “Last two weeks of the Great Comic Opera success ----The--------,” etc., was upon all billboards and in the newspapers, before she acted.

“I’m not going out on the road,” said Miss Osborne.

Carrie went with her to apply to another manager.

“Ever had any experience?” was one of his questions.

“I’m with the company at the Casino now.”

“Oh, you are?” he said.

The end of this was another engagement at twenty per week.

Carrie was delighted.  She began to feel that she had a place in the world.  People recognized ability.

So changed was her state that the home atmosphere became intolerable.  It was all poverty and trouble there, or seemed to be, because it was a load to bear.  It became a place to keep away from.  Still she slept there, and did a fair amount of work, keeping it in order.  It was a sitting place for Hurstwood.  He sat and rocked, rocked and read, enveloped in the gloom of his own fate.  October went by, and November.  It was the dead of winter almost before he knew it, and there he sat.