"How can anybody know? I loved him, and I was the only one of many. He left me without a word, ... like a woman of the street ... not looking backward." She got up and moved about the room, the thick coil of her rich brown hair slipping to her shoulders, and her bodily perfection under the thin dressing gown distracting me even from the passion of her speech. I had a momentary pang of sympathy with the delinquent Lawrence, I could see how a man might be afraid almost, of the quality of her beauty. "Sometimes," she said, "I think marriage is a much more real relation than people think--that something real but invisible happens between them so that even if they are parted they are never quite the same again. It is like having a limb torn from you; you ache always, in the part you have lost." I knew something of what that ache could be, but I could only turn my face up to hers that she might see my tears. "You have enough of your own to bear," she said. "I must not lay my troubles on you; but I wanted to tell you how I know it is not love that makes art. I was dying for love when Mr. O'Farrell put me to acting. I was bleeding so ... and suddenly I reached out and laid hold of Whatever is, and I found I could act. It was as if the half of me that had been torn away had been between me and It, and I laid hold of It. That's how I know." She came behind me, leaning on my chair, and I put up my hands to her. "Oh, Sarah, Sarah, help me to lay hold of it, too!" But for all her shy confidences, deep within I didn't believe her. Toward the first of September we went back to the city, Sarah to begin rehearsals for _The Futurist_, and I to take up the dreary round of manager's offices and dramatic agencies. The best that was offered me was poor enough, but it had a faint savour of a superior motive clinging to it. It was from a Mr. Coleman, an actor manager of the old, heavy-jowled Shakespearian type, who was projecting a classic revival with himself in all the tragic parts, and I signed with him to play _Portia_, _Cleopatra_, and the wife of _Brutus_. We had been busy with rehearsals about ten days when I had a telegram from Forester saying that mother had died that day and I was to come immediately. It was late Sunday evening when I received it and I hunted up the manager at the hotel. "I'm going," I told him. "Well, of course, your contract----" "I'm going anyway ... and I know the lines." He was as considerate, I suppose, as could be expected. "I can give you three days," he calculated. "Four," I stipulated. "Well, four," he grudged. That would allow two days for the funeral. CHAPTER III