"Well, then ... you needn't go under your own name, and this is a chance; you could live and maybe get somewhere. Lowe told me he meant to strike for Broadway. You aren't insulted, are you?" "No, I'm not insulted." Curiously that was true. I was drunk and shaking inside of me; I seemed to be poised upon the dizzying edge, but I was neither angry nor insulted. "And I'd never come back on you if you got your chance for yourself ... honest to God, Olive. I've had my lesson at that. You believe me, don't you?" I believed him. I hadn't any sense whatever of the moral values of the situation. It was too desperate for that. "I guess I ought to tell you ... I'm a bad sort ... bad with women. After I knew that my--that Miss Dean didn't want me, I didn't care what became of me. There was a woman in the company ... she liked me, and I thought it would give Laura a chance. That was what the divorce was about. I thought I could make it up to the other woman by marrying her. But that didn't work either." He was silent a while, forgetting perhaps that he had begun to explain himself to me. "There's a way you've got to like a person to live with them ... and, anyway, I'm not asking you to marry me." He got as much satisfaction out of that as if it were a superior abnegation. "You've got to decide, right away," Griffin urged me. "I must have a day to think," I insisted, not because I hoped that anything would interfere between me and disaster, but I wanted to be able to throw it up to the Powers that I had given them an opportunity. I knew what he was. I had always known. When he put his cheek against mine to kiss me I had felt the marks there of waste and looseness, just as I felt now that native trick he had for extenuation, for putting himself on the pathetic, the excusing side of things. But I did not shrink from him. I suppose it was because just then he was a symbol of the protection which I had so signally gone without. The need of trusting is stronger in women than experience. Nothing saved me but the persistent monitor of my art. Here, when all else was numbed by loneliness and hunger and unsuccess, it waked and warned me. I had not drawn back from Griffin nor the relation he proposed to me; but I couldn't stand for _Flim-Flam_. I think just at first, though, I made myself believe I was considering it. I went out to see Pauline the next afternoon. Not that I expected anything from her. It was merely that she represented all that stood opposed to what I was being coerced into, and I meant to give it a chance. "I am thinking of going with 'Flim-Flam'," I told her. "Oh, but my dear--surely not with that!" "I'll get eighteen dollars a week and my expenses." "Well, of course, if you want to sell yourself just for a salary!" Pauline's attitude could not have been improved on if she had known all that the engagement implied, but it wasn't in her to be ungracious for long. "I suppose you'll get experience?"