"Oh," I said again, "good ... good ... what does it all mean? I'm a successful actress."
"Olivia!"
"Well, no, if you insist on knowing, I'm not what you would call a good woman." I threw it at her as though it had been a peculiar kind of scorn heaped up on her for being what I had just denied myself to be. I saw myself for once with all my thwarted and misspent instincts toward the proper destiny of women, enmeshed and crippled, not by any propensity for sinning, but by the conditions of loving which women like Pauline set up for me. "And if you want to know," I said, "why I'm not a good woman, it is because women like you don't make it seem particularly worth while."
"Oh," she gasped, "this is horrible ... horrible!" The word came out in a whisper. I saw at last that she was done with me, that the only thought that was left to her was to get away, to put as much space as possible between us. I got around with my hand on the door to prevent her.
"Pauline, Pauline!" I cried almost wildly, as if even at the last she could have helped me from myself. "Can't you remember that we grew up together, that we had the same training, the same ideals? Can't you remember that when we began I thought that the life you had chosen for yourself was the best, that I thought I had chosen it for myself too? Only—for heaven's sake, Pauline, try to understand me—there is something that chooses for us. Don't you know that I wouldn't have been any different from what you are if I hadn't been forced? Haven't you seen how I've been beaten back from all that I tried to be? All this"—I threw out my arms, as I stood against the door, to include all that had entered by implication in our conversation—"it had to come, and it came wrong because you won't understand that a Gift has its own way with us."
I could see, though, that she wasn't understanding in the least, that she was badly scared and even indignant at being forced to listen to a justification of what, by her code, could have no justification. She was standing not far from me, crushed against the wall, as though by the weight of opprobriousness that I heaped upon her, and her whole attention was centred on the door and the chance of getting out of it and away from what, in the mere despair of reaching her intelligence with it, I flung out from me now wildly.
"I suppose," I scoffed, "that it never occurs to you that a gifted woman could be as delicate and feminine as anybody, if only you didn't make her right to fostering care and protection conditional on her giving up her gift altogether. You," I demanded, "who tie up all the moral values of living to your own little set of behaviours, what right have you to deny us the opportunity to be loved honestly because you can't at the same time make us over into replicas of yourselves?"
I was sick with all the shames and struggles of the women I had known. I forgot the door and went over to her.
"You," I said, "who fatten your moral superiority on the best of all we produce, how do you suppose you are going to make us value the standards you set up, when the price you despise us for paying, nine times out of ten we pay to the men who belong to you? What right have you to judge what we have done when you've neither help nor understanding to offer us in the doing? What right ... what right?" For the moment I had turned away in the vehemence of my indignation; I was pacing up and down. In the instant when my attention was distracted from the door, Pauline made a dart for it. I could hear her scurrying down the hall, but I went on walking up and down in my room and talking aloud to her. I was beside myself with the sum of all indignities. Was it not this set of prejudices which for the moment had presented itself in the person of Pauline Mills, which at every turn of my life had been erected against the bourgeoning of my gift? Was it not in the process of combating the tradition of the preciousness of women as inherent in particular occupations, that I had lost the inestimable preciousness of myself? Was it for what came out of Pauline's frame of life—I thought of Cecelia Brune here—that I had sacrificed my public possession of the man I loved. And what came out of it that was more to the world than what I had to offer? Had I cut myself off from the comfort and stability of a home, simply because in my situation as famous tragedienne I didn't see my way to bring up Helmeth's children so as to make little Pauline Millses of them? I was still raging formlessly in this fashion when Miss Summers, our ingénue, came to tell me that the cab waited to take us to the theatre for the matinée.
All through the performance, which I was told went remarkably well, I was conscious of nothing but the seismic shudders and upheavals of my world too long subjected to strain. It came back on me in intervals through the evening performance; I was physically sick with it. But by degrees through its subsidence, new worlds began to rise. By the time I left the theatre that night I knew what I would do.