the active actual half of her life grew more discouraging,
harder to steer toward any object that seemed worth attaining, her
imaginary life with Rodney lost its grip on fact and reason; became
roseate, romantic, a thinner and more iridescent bubble, readier to
burst and disappear altogether at an ungentle touch.

So you will understand, I think, that the Rose, who incredulously heard
him ask in that dull sullen tone, if she had anything besides what would
go into her trunk; the Rose who got up and turned on the light for a
look at him in the hope that the evidence of her eyes would belie that
of her ears; the Rose he left shuddering at the window in that quilted
dressing-gown, was not the Rose who had left him three months before and
rented that three-dollar room and wrung a job out of Galbraith!

Dimly she was aware of this herself. At her best she wouldn't have lost
her head, wouldn't have flown to pieces like that. If she'd kept any
sort of grip on the situation, she might at least have averted a total
shipwreck. She understood even on that gray morning, that the terrible
things he'd said to her had been a mere outcry; the expression of a mood
she had encountered before, though this was an extreme example of it.

But it was a long time before she went any further than that. The memory
of the whole episode from the moment when he came up to her there in the
alley and took her by the shoulders, until he closed her door upon
himself four hours or so later, was so exquisitely painful that any
reasoned analysis of it, any construction of potential alternatives to
the thing that had happened, was simply impossible. The misgiving that
with a little more courage and patience on her part, it might have
terminated differently, only added to her misery.

She felt like a coward when she went to Goldsmith and demanded to be
sent out on the road, and she experienced for a while, the utter
demoralization of cowardice. The logic of the situation told her to stay
where she was. If it were true, as she had fiercely told him that night,
that their life together was ended, the whole fabric that they had woven
for themselves rent clean across, then the only thing for her to do was
to begin living now, as she had made an effort to do before, quite
without reference to him, ordering her own existence as if he had ceased
to exist; stick to whatever offered herself, Doris Dane, the best chance
for success and advancement. She was, of cour