Seven Miles to Arden

"[...]Players had not proved sufficient to propitiate that iron-hearted monster, Financial Success. The company went into bankruptcy before they had played half their bookings. Their final curtain went down on a bit of serio-comic drama staged, impromptu, on a North River dock, with barely enough cash in hand to pay the company's home passage. On this occasion Patsy had missed her cue for the first time. She had been left in the wings, so to speak; and that night she filled the only vacant bed in the women's free ward of the City Hospital.
It was pneumonia. Patsy had tossed about and moaned with the racking pain of it, raving deliriously through her score or more of rôles. She [...]".