I think we arrived at this certainty about our powers, night by night, that year as we came together after the performance, Sarah as though she had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished, but I--I came hungry--_always_! Sometimes it was merely with the feeling of interrupted capacity, as when one has left off in the middle of the course; when I would continue acting in my room, going over my part, recalling others, trying experiments with them, pouring myself out until Sarah, poor dear, fell asleep in the midst of her effort to be interested. Other times I would rage up and down, all my soul baffled and aching with incompletion. I do not mean to say I hadn't taken a healthy satisfaction in what had come to me, the knowledge of being worth while, of contributing something; not less in sheer bodily well-being, leisure, beautiful clothes, conscious harmony with my background. I had more feeling of home for that little flat of ours than I had ever known in my mother's house, or my husband's, for the plain reason that its lines and colours and adjustments were in tune with my temperament, as nothing I had had before had been. It wasn't until I had the means to give my personal preference full scope, that I discovered how much of gracelessness in myself had been but the unconscious reaction to inharmonies of colour and line. I had developed, in response to my environment, the quality called charm. And I was a successful actress. I have to go back to that to get anything like the effect of solidity which my world took on with that certainty. I was developing too, as my critics allowed, and gave promise of steady growth. I was well paid and well friended. I don't mean to say, either, that I did not get something out of being a part of the dramatic movement of my time, knowing and known of the best it afforded. I was integrally a part of that half-careless, hard-working, well-living crowd so envied of the street: I knew a great many notables by their first names. And all the time I wanted something! At last I knew what I wanted. "It will come," Sarah had faith for me. "Everything comes if it is called hard enough. But you mustn't allow yourself to be persuaded by your wanting it so much, to take any sort of substitute." That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world, wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some aspect of it struck across my hereditary prejudices, and gave me a feeling of isolation, of separateness which drove me back in time, to condone the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking his leading woman to have a liaison with the leading man because "it kept her limbered up."