"They never told me anything; I had to find it out."
"Jerry too; he thought he was going to have a graceful, docile creature to keep him in a perpetual state of maleness. I should have thought you'd have left the stage after that," I said, reverting to the personal instance.
"I ought to have, but somehow I kept feeling her; even when I wasn't thinking of her I could feel her somewhere pulling me. It was like living in the house where some one has died, and you keep thinking they're just in the next room and you don't want to go away for fear you'll lose them altogether."
"I understand."
The afternoon light had withdrawn into the bleak sky without illuminating it. I threw open the stove for the sake of the ruddy light, and the intimacy of our sitting there drew me on to counter confession.
"It's like that with me all the time," I said, "only there hasn't really been anybody. Sarah says there doesn't have to be anybody; that we only think so because we have felt it that way once. She thinks it is just ... Personality ... whatever there is that we act to."
"Well, I know you have to have it, anyway you can get it."
"O'Farrell used to call it feeling your job. I wonder where he is now." So the talk drifted off to the perpetual professionalism of the unsuccessful, to incidents of rehearsals and engagements. I believe it would have been good for me to have run my mind in new pastures, but there was nobody to open the gates for me.
I said as much to Sarah the very next time I saw her; it seemed a way of getting at what I hadn't yet told her, that I was within a week or two of the end of my means. I had the best of reasons for not calling my case to her attention, in the readiness with which she offered herself to my necessity.
"You must go to New York of course; I've three hundred dollars, and I could send you something every month——" I cut her off absolutely.