g thing.

But that part of the battle of life had to consist just in doing
nothing, enduring with a stiff mouth and clenched hands assaults that
couldn't be replied to, was a fact she hadn't foreseen. What a child she
had always been! Rodney, Portia, everybody who amounted to anything,
must have learned that lesson of sheer endurance long ago.

The queerly incredible quality of the lighted half of her life--the half
that John Galbraith's will galvanized into motion--prevented any
afterglow from illuminating and making tolerable the dark half. No
achievement of her days--not even teaching the sextette to talk--had the
power to give her, in her nights, a sense of progress, or to lessen the
necessity for that sheer dumb endurance which was the only weapon she
had. Because she was in the fetters of a fixed idea.

Of course it was only by virtue of the possession of a fixed idea--a
purpose as rigid in its outlines as the steel frame of a
sky-scraper--that she had been able to force herself to leave Rodney and
set out in pursuit of a job that would make a life of her own a possible
thing. You are already acquainted with the outlines of that purpose. She
lacked the special training which alone could make any sort of
self-respecting life possible. The only thing she had to capitalize when
she left her husband's house, was the thing which had got her into
it--her sex charm. The only excuse for capitalizing that again was that
it would make it possible for her to acquire a special training in some
other field. Stenography, she had thought vaguely, would be the first
round of the ladder. Until this production opened and she began drawing
a salary, she couldn't really begin doing the thing she had set out to
do.

Consequently, anything that seemed like progress during her day's work
for Galbraith--any glow of triumph she came away with after meeting and
conquering some difficulty--must be pure illusion.

It was all perfectly logical and it was all perfectly false. She had
been growing really, in strides, from day to day, since that first day
of all when, after hearing the director tell another woman that there
were no vacancies in the chorus, she had forced herself to go up and ask
him for a job. She had been disciplining herself under Rodney's own
definition of the term. Discipline, he had said, was standing the
gaff--standing it, not submitting to it; accepting the facts of your own
life as they happened to be! Not making ma