I spent a great deal of time just walking, for there was not much doing in the theatrical line to interest me, and I was sustained and tormented by intimations that somewhere, not far from me, my Help walked too. I don't know where this conviction came from that there was help somewhere in the world; but by the middle of the summer the terrible, keen need of it walked with me through all my days and lay down with me at night. There were times when the certainty that it was there seemed almost enough to lift me again to a plane of power, other times when the sheer hunger of it bit into the bone. It was most like the sense I had had as a child of the large friendliness that brooded over Hadley's pasture; it was like the promise of the shining destiny that had moved between my youth and the common occurrence; but now at times, just along the edge of sleep, or out of the thick, waking drowse of heat, it shaped familiarly human. I think about that time I must have dreamed again the dream I had of Helmeth Garrett just after I had seen Modjeska, writing that letter in his uncle's house; and with the help of what my mother had told me I was able to read it plain. I do not distinctly remember dreaming this, but there were times when, just after waking, my mind would be full of him, and there would be a stir in me of the wings of power. But in the broad day, though I thought of him often, I could not so much as recall his face clearly. The one thing that I remembered about him was that I had pleased him. It was a mortifying certainty that Jerry's ready acceptance of me as a woman of whom his wife could not possibly be jealous, had defined for me, that I didn't in general know how to please and interest men. They often were interested in me, but I was never in the least conscious of what drew them or caused them to sheer away. I had a suspicion, doubtless of Taylorvillian extraction, that there was a sort of culpability in knowing; but it came back to me now almost with a thrill that I had known with Helmeth Garrett. I had been able, out of all the possible things which might be said, to choose the thing that swayed him. I hadn't known ever for what things my husband loved me; but in a brief hour with Helmeth Garrett I was conscious of much in my manner to him arising from his conscious need. And I had no more than shaped this in my mind than I felt a faint stirring within me as of power.