"Ach, my Gott," in moments of great excitement he reverted to the trick of the tongue to which he was born. "All these years I have waited for this, I have said Miss Lattimore is a great actress, she has talent, she has brains, and when she will have passion--Pouff!" He blew out his loose lips and made a balloon with his hands to express the rate at which I would rise in the scale of tragic actresses. "And now that it has happened, she wants to live in Mexico." He deflated himself suddenly, folded his hands over what he believed to be his bosom, and looked at me reproachfully. This being the first time he had studied my face directly since I came home, I suppose he must have seen there my doubt and indecision. "Understand me," he said soberly, "I have known a lot of actresses, and I want to tell you that this marrying business don't pay. They got to come back to the stage; they got to. You ain't going to be any different down there in Mexico to what you are in New York, understand me. _Yah!_ Mexico!" The word seemed to inflame him. But he had the sense to let me alone for a while. A few days later I saw in the paper that he had taken the lease of the theatre he had mentioned to me, and I knew that he wasn't counting on my going to Mexico. I suppose if I had had the courage to look into my own mind to find out what I wished to do, I might have surmised what was going on there from the fact that I didn't mention the idea of marriage to Sarah. I have tried--all this book has had no other purpose in fact, than to try to tell how I came to be in the relation I was to Helmeth Garrett, came into it as to a room long prepared for me, without any struggles or tormenting, and without thinking much about the effect that his presence in my life would have upon my work. I suppose that in as much as I had a man's attitude toward work, I had come unconsciously to the man's habit of keeping love and my career, in two watertight compartments. I found I was not able to think of them as having much to do with one another. Still less had I the traditional shames of my situation. I remember the first time I went to rehearsal, groping about in my consciousness for the source of what I felt suddenly divide me from the rest of my company, and finding it in the knowledge of myself as a woman acquainted with passion, with a secret, delicious life. And far from identifying me with the cheapness and betrayal which until now I had supposed inseparable from the uncertified union, it set me apart in the aloofness of the exclusive, the distinguishing experience. It remained for Sarah to pierce me, in spite of all I intrinsically felt my relation to Helmeth Garrett to be, with the knowledge of where I stood in the world which I still believed had the last word about human conduct.