himself; he was it and it was he.
Everything she said and did on the stage had continued, as it had begun
in her very first rehearsal by being, just the expression of his will
through her instrumentality. It was amazing to her that, with the core
of it drawn out, the fabric should still stand; that the piece should go
on repeating itself night after night, automatically, awakening the
delighted applause of that queer foolish monster, the audience, just
with its galvanic simulation of the life he had once imparted to it.

She was doing her own part, she felt at all events, in a manner utterly
lifeless and mechanical. It was a stifling existence!

The most discouraging thing about it was that the others in the company
seemed not to feel it in the same way. Anabel Astor for example: night
after night she seemed to be born anew into her part with the rise of
the first curtain; she fought and conquered and cajoled, and luxuriated
in the approbation of every new audience, just as she had in the case of
the first, and came off all aglow with her triumph, as if the thing had
never happened to her before. And with the others, in varying degrees,
even with the chorus people, the effect seemed to be the same.

But it was actually in the air, Rose believed, not merely in her own
fancy, that she was failing to justify the promise she had given at
rehearsal. Not alarmingly, to be sure. She was still plenty good enough
to hold down her job. But the notion, prevalent, it appeared, before the
opening, that she was one of those persons who can't be kept down in the
chorus, but project themselves irresistibly into the ranks of the
principals, was coming to be considered a mistake.

Galbraith, as was evident from his last talk with her, hadn't made that
mistake. She remembered his having said she never could be an actress.
That was all right of course. She didn't want to be. In a way, it was
just because she didn't want to be that she couldn't be. But having it
come home to her as it was doing now, in her own experience, made her
all the more impatient to get out of the profession that wasn't hers and
into the one that had beckoned her so alluringly.

It was just here that her disappointment was sharpest. The light that
for a few weeks had flared up so brightly, showing a clear path of
success that would lead her back to Rodney, had, suddenly, just when she
needed it most, gone out and left her wondering whether, after all, it
had bee