“Well, I don’t know,” said Carrie, when he had concluded, her interest and desire to shine dramatically struggling with her timidity for the mastery.  “I might go if you thought I’d do all right.”

“Of course, you’ll do,” said Drouet, who, in his efforts to enthuse Carrie, had interested himself.  “Do you think I’d come home here and urge you to do something that I didn’t think you would make a success of?  You can act all right.  It’ll be good for you.”

“When must I go?” said Carrie, reflectively.

“The first rehearsal is Friday night.  I’ll get the part for you to-night.”

“All right,” said Carrie resignedly, “I’ll do it, but if I make a failure now it’s your fault.”

“You won’t fail,” assured Drouet.  “Just act as you do around here.  Be natural.  You’re all right.  I’ve often thought you’d make a corking good actress.”

“Did you really?” asked Carrie.

“That’s right,” said the drummer.

He little knew as he went out of the door that night what a secret flame he had kindled in the bosom of the girl he left behind.  Carrie was possessed of that sympathetic, impressionable nature which, ever in the most developed form, has been the glory of the drama.  She was created with that passivity of soul which is always the mirror of the active world.  She possessed an innate taste for imitation and no small ability.  Even without practice, she could sometimes restore dramatic situations she had witnessed by re-creating, before her mirror, the expressions of the various faces taking part in the scene.  She loved to modulate her voice after the conventional manner of the distressed heroine, and repeat such pathetic fragments as appealed most to her sympathies.  Of late, seeing the airy grace of the ingenue in several well-constructed plays, she had been moved to secretly imitate it, and many were the little movements and expressions of the body in which she indulged from time to time in the privacy of her chamber.  On several occasions, when Drouet had caught her admiring herself, as he imagined, in the mirror, she was doing nothing more than recalling some little grace of the mouth or the eyes which she had witnessed in another.  Under his airy accusation she mistook this for vanity and accepted the blame with a faint sense of error, though, as a matter of fact, it was nothing more than the first subtle outcroppings of an artistic nature, endeavoring to re-create the perfect likeness of some phase of beauty which appealed to her.  In such feeble tendencies, be it known, such outworking of desire to reproduce life, lies the basis of all dramatic art.