He was as much out of key with the society in which Sarah's success and mine had placed him, as he was flattered to find himself there. It had brought out in him in the way privation had not, that touch of theatricality which intrigued Sarah's unsophisticated fancy in the first place. He let his hair grow into curls and made a mysterious and incurable pain of his broken health. And though he offered it as the best he had to offer, with humility, he suffered an accession of that devoted manner which had won his way among women of his own class, but which among the sort he met at my rooms was ridiculous. Jerry too, with his married life in dissolution, for what looked to Helmeth, and in the light of his strong sense, was beginning to look to me like an aimless folly; out of all these blew a wind witheringly on the fine bloom of my happiness. We did best when we shut it out in a profound, exalted intimacy of passion. What leads me to think that Polatkin must have watched me rather closely all this time, is the fact that he waited until Mr. Garrett was gone to London again in the latter part of February, to put it to me that if I really meant to leave the stage permanently, and it was a contingency which, in speaking to me of it, he had the wit to speak seriously, I could do no better for myself than to take flight from it from the roof of my own theatre. He put it to me in his own dialect, mixed of the green room and Jewry, that I had torn a large hole in the surrounding professional atmosphere by the vitality of my acting that winter, and that it would be a great shame to go out into the obscurity of marriage without this final pyrotechnic burst. I could have, by his calculation, a short season to open with, and a whole year of brilliant success before--well before anything happened. I think by this time I must have known subconsciously that nothing would happen. It must be because no man naturally can imagine any more compelling business for a woman than being interested in him, that Helmeth failed to understand that he could as well have torn himself from the enterprise for which he had starved and sweated, as separate me from the final banquet of success. I had paid for it and I must eat.