"Well, why didn't you ask Henry, then? Henry knows what becomes of women on the stage when they can't make a living." This was nearer to the mark than I had meant to let myself go, but I could see that it carried no illumination. She drew up her wrap and braced herself for one more gallant effort. "The things you've been through, my dear ... I don't wonder you feel bitter. But when it has all come out right, why not forget it?" "Oh, right! Right!" The room was full of vases and floral tokens of the triumph of the night before, and as I swung about with my arms out, disdaining her judgment of rightness for me, I knocked over a great basket of roses and orchids which had come from Cline and Erskine. I don't suppose Pauline had ever knocked over anything in her life, and the violence of my gesture must have stood for some unloosening of the bonds of convention, with an implication which only now began to work through to her. "You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you ... that you are not ... not a good woman?" "Oh," I said again, "good ... good ... what does it all mean? I'm a successful actress." "Olivia!" "Well, no, if you insist on knowing, I'm not what you would call a good woman." I threw it at her as though it had been a peculiar kind of scorn heaped up on her for being what I had just denied myself to be. I saw myself for once with all my thwarted and misspent instincts toward the proper destiny of women, enmeshed and crippled, not by any propensity for sinning, but by the conditions of loving which women like Pauline set up for me. "And if you want to know," I said, "why I'm not a good woman, it is because women like you don't make it seem particularly worth while." "Oh," she gasped, "this is horrible ... horrible!" The word came out in a whisper. I saw at last that she was done with me, that the only thought that was left to her was to get away, to put as much space as possible between us. I got around with my hand on the door to prevent her. "Pauline, Pauline!" I cried almost wildly, as if even at the last she could have helped me from myself. "Can't you remember that we grew up together, that we had the same training, the same ideals? Can't you remember that when we began I thought that the life you had chosen for yourself was the best, that I thought I had chosen it for myself too? Only--for heaven's sake, Pauline, try to understand me--there is something that chooses for us. Don't you know that I wouldn't have been any different from what you are if I hadn't been forced? Haven't you seen how I've been beaten back from all that I tried to be? All this"--I threw out my arms, as I stood against the door, to include all that had entered by implication in our conversation--"it had to come, and it came wrong because you won't understand that a Gift has its own way with us."