This had, ere long, enabled her to locate in a more desirable part of the city, and to handsomely furnish a large apartment, with a studio for her musical work; and, with competent help to relieve her of all domestic drudgery, she found life easier and brighter than it had even been since the first year of her marriage. Neither did she relax effort in her own behalf; she put herself under a noted finishing teacher, both to enhance her own attractions and to keep her repertoire up to date. Dorothy, also, was given every advantage, and at the age of nineteen entered college, from which she graduated four years later.
Meanwhile, she also had developed a decided talent for music, possessing a rich contralto voice that promised great things for the future; and the ensuing two years were spent in making the most of her talent, until, as we have seen, she was beginning to create quite a stir in musical circles, and to share honors with her mother.
They had lived very harmoniously during most of this time, trying to forget the bitter past, and every year becoming nearer and dearer to each other, until, as Dorothy had told Clifford Alexander, they were "more like two devoted chums or sisters than mother and daughter."
But all this had not been achieved without severe struggles on the part of Helen. During the first two years of her sojourn in New York, notwithstanding her almost phenomenal success, she had been bitterly unreconciled to the fate that had doomed her to live out her life as a deserted wife, to be both father and mother to her child, and had even necessitated the concealment of her identity in order to save Dorothy the mortification of being known as the daughter of a divorcee.
She had seasons of wretched brooding, almost amounting to despair, during which it would seem that she could not force herself to fulfill her engagements; when she simply wallowed in the mire of bitter humiliation, rebellion, and self-pity, in view of having been made the target of a malicious fate, the football of an irresponsible man's fickleness, indolence, and selfishness; of an unscrupulous woman's blandishments and coquetry, and her life wrecked in its prime.
For herself, aside from her child, the future seemed to hold no promise; she was not yet forty years of age; she might live forty years longer. Would she have courage sufficient to sustain her so long—to carry this intolerable thorn that rankled in her heart continually? And what made this thorn in the flesh so intolerable? she sometimes asked herself. If her husband had died, she might have grieved for a time over the memory of his unkind treatment of her; but eventually the sting of it would have ceased, and the wound would have healed, and she would have forgiven him.
And what was this thorn, anyway? The question came to her, almost like an audible voice, one day, when she had been more than usually depressed; and, with a sudden inward shrinking from herself, it was forced upon her that it was of her own planting and nourishment, and its sting was her own bitterness, hate, and resentment against the living man, who had left her for another; and also hatred against the woman who had decoyed him from her.
She recoiled from the shocking revelation with a sense of loathing. It was as if she had discovered a nest of poisonous vipers writhing in her own bosom, but which she had carefully and persistently nursed, calling them by other names—disgrace, injured innocence, martyrdom, righteous indignation, et cetera—hugging their stings and the corroding sores they produced.
Immediately upon awakening to this she resolved to purify her consciousness from what she now recognized as willful sin and selfishness. She conscientiously tried to divest herself of the habit of dwelling upon the unhappy past; she strove to bury it so far out of sight by throwing herself more heartily into her work, and into Dorothy's interests and pleasures, that even its ghost could never arise to confront her again.
As time passed, she gradually grew to feel that she was really rising above it. The clouds of depression began to lift, the sun of prosperity melted away the mists of anxiety and care for the future, while the appreciation and kindness of increasing friends broadened and cheered her life in many ways.