But always “She used to be—” Always that.
[121]
] There was no quibbling, no splitting of hairs. She knew! And with the acknowledgment she rose to her feet, a great overwhelming defiance seizing her. She would not let age get her. She would not go downhill. She would not become a has-been! Rather would she quit the stage now and let them say she had retired in her prime. Money she had—an income larger than she needed. She would cut herself off from the theater entirely; for looking in at the window of a house of cheer whose door is barred—that would be unbearable. She would have to travel, to seek diversion elsewhere. Then suddenly like the lifting of a rosy veil on barren waste, she saw her career a thing of the past and herself wandering down the declining years of life—alone. The desert youth takes no count of—aloneness—stretched bleak and endless, a reach of sand with no oasis to slake the thirst, no shade to cool the soul.
And there swamped her with a sickening sense of need the longing for that bulwark of days gone, the one thing that endures, the one thing that counts not success nor failure, that survives when the ladder itself lies crumbled in ruins. Giving it no conscious name, she knew only that had Bob been there he would have shouldered the burden of this cold hour of facing truth. He would somehow have contrived to make it easier for her to hold her head high and continue to look down, even though that look must be directed toward the sunset.
Bob, whose adoration had helped her always over the difficult places, Bob would to-day and through all the days to come have stood by to help her bridge this most difficult place of all.
[122]
] Bob!! Well, why not?
Many hours she paced the floor, brows drawn together, hands clenched as if grappling with a flesh and blood thing.
The peacock’s strut is slow and calculating. He lowers his head only to gaze upon his own reflection in the pool. To shed the trait that has made him world famous is to lay his gorgeous plumage in the dust.
The train steamed into the Santa Fé Station at Los Angeles. A woman descended, the sort to whom one gives a second glance in spite of tired lines round the eyes and little crinkles at their corners. Gowned in the latest cut of blue serge, with a tan traveling cloak swung across her arm, she cried New York the instant one laid eyes on her.
She put her maid and bags into a cab, and sent them to the Ambassador Hotel. Stepping into another, she told the driver to take her to the Graystone Studio.
It was an afternoon of late June. The languorous breath of California summer had kissed the foliage into mammoth bloom. They drove through lazy, sunny streets, somnolent under warm skies, into that vortex of activity modern commerce has planted in the midst of beauty, the frame of artifice sprung up mushroom-like in the very heart of Nature.