still get nervous?"

"Of course I do. I don't mind nerves so much as getting numbed," Thea
muttered, sheltering her face for a moment with her muff. "I'm under a
spell, you know, hoodooed. It's the thing I WANT to do that I can never
do. Any other effects I can get easily enough."

"Yes, you get effects, and not only with your voice. That's where you
have it over all the rest of them; you're as much at home on the stage
as you were down in Panther Canyon--as if you'd just been let out of a
cage. Didn't you get some of your ideas down there?"

Thea nodded. "Oh, yes! For heroic parts, at least. Out of the rocks, out
of the dead people. You mean the idea of standing up under things, don't
you, meeting catastrophe? No fussiness. Seems to me they must have been
a reserved, somber people, with only a muscular language, all their
movements for a purpose; simple, strong, as if they were dealing with
fate bare-handed." She put her gloved fingers on Fred's arm. "I don't
know how I can ever thank you enough. I don't know if I'd ever have got
anywhere without Panther Canyon. How did you know that was the one thing
to do for me? It's the sort of thing nobody ever helps one to, in this
world. One can learn how to sing, but no singing teacher can give
anybody what I got down there. How did you know?"

"I didn't know. Anything else would have done as well. It was your
creative hour. I knew you were getting a lot, but I didn't realize how
much."

Thea walked on in silence. She seemed to be thinking.

"Do you know what they really taught me?" she came out suddenly. "They
taught me the inevitable hardness of human life. No artist gets far who
doesn't know that. And you can't know it with your mind. You have to
realize it in your body, somehow; deep. It's an animal sort of feeling.
I sometimes think it's the strongest of all. Do you know what I'm
driving at?"

"I think so. Even your audiences feel it, vaguely: that you've sometime
or other faced things that make you different."

Thea turned her back to the wind, wiping away the snow that clung to her
brows and lashes. "Ugh!" she exclaimed; "no matter how long a breath you
have, the storm has a longer. I haven't signed for next season, yet,
Fred. I'm holding out for a big contract: forty performances. Necker
won't be able to do much next winter. It's going to be one of those
between seasons; the old singers are too old, and the new ones are too
new. They might as well risk me as an