I got behind the counter, past him toward the door.
"You an actress ... you don't mean to say! By Jove, I'm not going to be made a fool of after such an encouragement! I'm not going without——"
"Mr. Montague," I said, "Tillie Hemingway is coming to stay with me nights; she will be here in a few minutes; you'd better not let her find you here." I unbarred the door and threw it wide open.
"Oh, come now——" He struggled for some footing other than defeat. "Of course, if you can't meet me like a woman of the world——you're a nice actress, you are!" I looked at him; the steps and voices of passersby sounded on the pavement; he went out with his tail between his legs. I locked the door after him and double locked it.
I climbed up to my room and locked myself in that. The boiling of my blood made such a noise in my ears that I could not hear Tillie Hemingway when she came knocking, and the poor girl went away in tears. After a long time I got to bed and sat there with my arms about my knees. I did not feel safe there; I knew I should never be safe again except in that little square of the world upon which the footlights shone, from which the tightening of the reins of the audience in my hands, should justify my life to me. I was sick with longing for it, aching like a woman abandoned for the arms of her beloved. I fled toward it with all my thought from illicit solicitation, but it was not the husband of my body I thought of in that connection, but the choice of my soul.
People wonder why sensitive, self-respecting women are not driven away from the stage by the offences that hedge it; they are driven deeper and farther into its enfoldment. There is nothing to whiten the burning of its shames but the high whiteness of its ultimate perfection. It is so with all art, not back in the press of life, but forward on some over-topping headland, one loses behind the yelping pack and eases the sting of resentment. I did not agree in the beginning to make you understand this. I only tell you that it is so. All that night I sat with my head upon my knees and considered how I might win back to it.
I tried, when my husband came home, to put the incident to him in a way that would stand for my new-found determination. I did not get so far with it. I saw him shrink from the mere recital with a man's timorousness.
"Oh, come—he couldn't have meant so bad as that." His male dread of a "situation" plead with me not to insist upon it. "And he went just as soon as you told him to. Of course if he had tried to force you ... but you say yourself he went quietly."
He was seeing and shrinking from what Higgleston would get out of the incident in the way of vulgar entertainment if I insisted on his taking it up; by the code there, I shouldn't have been subject to such if I hadn't invited it.
"Of course," he enforced himself, "you did right to turn him down, but I don't believe he'll try it again."