Then came the lecture tour itself. It was preceded by a campaign of advertising, artfully laid out by her manager, and in the end proved so marked a financial success that Cordelia herself was assured--whatever else might happen--of a generous competency for the remainder of her natural life. And many times, brooding over and making the most of this fact, she thought of those earlier and sadly uncertain days when she had frugally washed out her own towel and hung it to dry before her little studio window.
If the lecture itself--prepared by an expert in the employ of her manager, and dealing gravely, yet with flashes of facetiousness, with The American Woman--was a somewhat qualified success in the larger Eastern cities, effetely tending to a flippant view of life's more vital problems, Cordelia's tour through the South, and also the West, partook not a little of the nature of a Roman triumph.
Not that this triumph was without its trials, from the blunt suggestion of her manager that her next lecture deal with How I Wrote My First Novel, to the long and agonizing night of nervous collapse after the ordeal of her first appearance on the platform. Though frail in body, she could withstand much, and was seldom ill. But the ordeal of that first lecture had left her white and shattered and limp; and it was then, the first time for many a long day, that she gave herself over to tears. She wept long and bitterly, and walked the room of her hotel till morning. Then she sent for a doctor, and clung to that kindly eyed man, when he came, with the pitiful forlornness of a lost and homesick child.
In many of the towns, particularly in the West, she became the guest of different women's clubs, and sometimes after her lecture a reception was held, and often hundreds of admiring and anxious-eyed women would press up to shake her hand. Through all this she carried herself well, and with a certain dignity. But many of those who met her at once remarked how different she was from her pictures, and asked, perhaps a little bewildered, just how young--or how old--she was.
When she lectured at Lexington her father came in secret--for she had written to him pleading with him not to do so--to hear his wonderful daughter, whom even he himself had never quite understood. And when, toward the close of the lecture, the sound of quiet sobs rose from the back of the audience, there was a dramatic moment when the woman on the platform stopped speaking and caught hurriedly at the little table beside her for support.