chance that had been offered her was
a ladder that would enable her to climb part of the way back to him. Her
accomplishment of this first breathlessly exciting task would be a
thing, when it was achieved, that she could recount to him--well, as man
to man. Her success, if she succeeded--and the alternative was something
she wouldn't contemplate--would compel the same sort of respect from him
that he accorded to a diagnosis of James Randolph's, or an article of
Barry Lake's.

Since she had left his house and begun this new life of hers, she had,
as best she could, been fighting him out of her thoughts altogether. She
had shrunk from anything that carried associations of him with it.
Outside the hours of rehearsal (and how grateful she always was when
they protracted themselves unduly) she had walked timidly, like a child
down a dim hallway with black yawning doorways opening out of it, in a
dread which sometimes reached the intensity of terror, lest reminders of
the man she loved should spring out upon her. That all thoughts and
memories of him must necessarily be painful, she had taken for granted.

But with this sudden lighting up of hope, which took place within her
when she made John Galbraith that astonishing offer and he accepted it,
she flung the closed door wide and called her husband back into her
thoughts--greeted the image of him passionately, in an almost palpable
embrace. This hard thing that she was going to do, which had, to
common-sense calculation, so many chances of disaster in it--this thing
that meant sleepless nights, and feverishly active days, was an
expression simply of her love for him; a sacrificial offering to be laid
before the shrine of him in her heart. Well, it was no wonder then that
to John Galbraith she had seemed preoccupied and far away, nor that amid
the surging thoughts and memories of her lover, coming in like a
returning tide, she should have been deaf to a meaning in the director's
tones that any one of the stupid little flutterers in the chorus would
instantly have understood.

A man with a volcanic incandescence within him such as was now afire in
Rose, is utterly useless until it subsides--totally incapable, at least,
of any sort of creative or imaginative work. Until the fire can be, by
one means or another and for the time being, put out, he has no energies
worth mentioning, to devote to anything else. And, just as no woman can
understand the cold austerities of the cell i