Despair's Last Journey by David Christie Murray

Claudia's introduction served so well that Paul was allowed to show what he was made of in rehearsal at the Mirror Theatre, with a prospective salary of fifty shillings a week. He had been a personage of late, and Darco had delegated to him a good deal of his own authority. He was not a personage any longer, and he was not altogether happy in his fall from dignity. But Claudia was coming. He and Claudia would be in the same house together, and playing at the same theatre. He would see her at breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner; he would escort her from the theatre and home again. That would be happiness enough to atone for anything.

This prophecy was not quite realized. Claudia chose to breakfast in her own room, and she was a woman of many friends, and lunched out and dined out so often that Paul hardly saw anything of her. The Sundays would have been Elysian days, but ladies and gentlemen of fashionable aspect drove to the house in handsome equipages, and spirited Miss Belmont away to revels at Richmond and elsewhere in which Paul had no part. He moved sadly about the house, in the streets, with no heart for study, or for the writing of the new comedy on which his mind had been set so warmly only a few weeks before. His old companions were travelling about the country, meeting old friends and making new ones, and he wished himself back amongst them many a time. He could have written to Claudia, and have looked forward to the time when he could have met her again on equal terms. They were not equals any longer.