, in a way
almost incredible to herself when they were over, had been almost
happy--would have been altogether happy, but for the stain that soaked
through in memory and in anticipation, from the other half of her days.

But when evening rehearsal was over and she came back to her room and
had to undress and put out her light and relax her mind for sleep,
letting the terrors that came to tear at her do their unopposed worst,
then the girl who sang and danced and was so nearly happy snatching John
Galbraith's intentions half formed, and executing them in the thrill of
satisfaction over work well done, became an utterly unreal, incredible
person--the mere figment of a dream that couldn't--couldn't possibly
recur again even as a dream; the only self in her that had any actual
existence was Rodney Aldrich's wife and the mother of his children,
lying here in a mean bed, or looking with feverish eyes out of the
window in a North Clark Street rooming house, in a torment of thwarted
desire for him that was by no means wholly mental or psychical.

And what was he doing now in her absence? Was he in torment, too; shaken
by gusts of uncontrollable longing for her; fighting off nightmare
imaginings of disasters that might be befalling her? Or was he happy,
drinking down in great thirsty drafts the nectar of liberty which her
incursion into his life had deprived him of? She didn't know which of
these alternatives was the more intolerable to her.

And the twins! Were they, the fine lusty little cherubs she had parted
from that day, smiling up with growing recognition into other
faces--Mrs. Ruston's and the maid Doris'? Or might there have been,
since the last information relayed by Portia, a sudden illness? Might it
be that there was going on now, in that house not a thousand yards away,
another life-and-death struggle like the one which had made an end of
all her hopes for the efficacy of her miracle?

The only treatment for hobgoblins like that was plain endurance. This
was a part of a somber sobering discovery that Rose had made during the
first few days of her new life. Courage of the active sort she'd always
had. The way she went up to North End Hall and wrested a job that didn't
strictly exist, from John Galbraith, was an example of it. When it was a
question of blazing up and doing something, she had rightly counted on
herself not to fail. This was what she'd foreseen when she promised
Portia that she would fight for the bi