I lay awake a long time after I came from the theatre, and the mere circumstance of my being alone and in a hotel, as well as the events that led up to it, brought back to me the sense of my lover, of his being just in the next room and presently to come in to me. I felt near and warm toward him. And then I thought of Sarah and Griffin and how almost I had become the stop-gap to his affections that she dreaded most to find herself to have been. It didn't seem very real in retrospect. I shuddered away from it. Then I began to think how I had first been kindly disposed toward him, and that brought up an image of the dim corridor of the hotel where I had come to my first knowledge of such relations, and my abhorrence and terror of it. I thought of O'Farrell and of Miss Dean, and that suspicion of sickliness which her personality had for me, and saw how it must have arisen from her consciousness of what she had done to Griffin rather than her relation to Manager O'Farrell. Then I thought of Helmeth Garrett and one night in Sienna when the moonlight poured white over the cathedral ... and a linden tree in bloom outside the window ... and a nightingale singing in it ... Suddenly it was mixed up in my mind with the slanting chandelier and the tin-faced clock, and slowly a sense of unutterable stain and shame began to percolate through and through me.
CHAPTER VI
It is a great mistake to suppose that assertiveness is the only mannish trait taken on by successful women, nor is pliability the only feminine mark they lose. By what insensible degrees it came about I do not know, but I found myself on the peak of popularity, very much of the male propensity to be beguiled. I was willing to be played upon, and so it was skilfully done, to concede to it more than the situation had a right to claim for itself. I pulled myself up afterward, or was pulled up by the sharp rein of destiny, but for the time, while my success was new, I was aware not only of the possibility of my being handled, but of my luxuriating in it, of demanding it as the price of my favour, and in particular, of valuing Polatkin for the way in which, by my own moods, my drops and exaltations he brought me to his hand.
How much of the fact of my private life he was really acquainted with, I never knew, but he understood enough of its reaction to make even my resistences serve to push me on to the assured position of a theatre and a clientele of my own. It stood out for me as he described it, not so much as a means of dividing me from my beloved, but as a new and completer way of loving. I wanted more ways for that, space and opportunity. I wished to lay my gift down, a royal carpet for Helmeth Garrett to walk on; I would have done anything for him with it except surrender it. Not the least thing that came of my condition was the extraordinary florescence of my art.
Every night as I drew its rich and shining fabric about me I was aware of all forms and passions, the mere masquerade of our delight in one another. Every night I embroidered it anew, I adored and caressed him with my skill. Polatkin went about wringing his hands over it.
"You are a Wonder, a Wonder! And you are wasting it on them swine." That was his opinion of my support. "And to think you could have a theatre of your own, and what you like——"
"A theatre like me—Me spread over it, expressed, exemplified, carried out to the least detail?"
"You shall have it even in the box office!" he responded magnificently.
"How soon?"