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The Second Wind of Mrs. Leslie Carter 111
change — much; they are still great artists, are Julia Marlowe, Edward Sothern, Otis Skinner, Blanche Bates, Henry Miller, David Warfield, John Drew of course, even Robert Mantell.”
“Manager across the street had to fight with him last season to keep Mantell — in the sixty-ninth year of his age — from playing Romeo,” I interpolated.
“That’s the spirit!” applauded Mrs. Carter, and she was applauding not the manager but the actor. “Growing old is only a state of mind. Not that I’m a Christian Scientist, either, but I refuse to get in that state of mind. I can close my mind against anything, anything,” she went on vehemently. “When they used to publish and say terrible things about me I could close my mind and tell myself that these things were not being said about me but about some strange, remote, interesting, historical character.
“No matter,” she added slowly, “what anybody says, it can’t alter your estimate of yourself. I know what I am. And my answer to anything anybody says is, ‘I’m here!’ ”
“I had to put away my notes and was about to go when Mr. Belasco’s name was spoken — I forget by whom or in what connection — but I clearly recall her words when the name of the manager who molded her to fame came up.
“I have not spoken to Mr. Belasco for sixteen years,” she volunteered. “I have seen him once within that time ; we were as near as you and I are now ; but we did not speak. And I was, for a while, sorry that we had not spoken. But now I’m glad we didn’t. There’s a little altar within me in which the David Belasco that I knew is enshrined — and for all the world I would not have it changed.”