I had not yet made up my mind as to whether I liked Henry Mills, but I was willing to go and see Modjeska with him; we had orchestra seats and Pauline insisted on my wearing her black silk wrap. On the way, Henry told me a great deal about Madam Modjeska with that same air of knowingness which fitted so oddly with his assumption of the model husband. I had accustomed myself to think of Henry as an attorney, which in Taylorville meant a man who could be trusted with the administration of widows' property and Fourth of July orations. Henry, it transpired, was a sort of junior partner in one of those city firms whose concern is not with people who have broken the law, but with those who are desirous to sail as close to the wind as possible without breaking it. They had a great deal to do with stock companies, in connection with which Henry had found some personal advantage. He always referred to it as "our office" so that I am in doubt still as to the exact nature of his connection with it; its only relation to his private life was to lead to his habitually appearing in what is known as a business suit, and an air of shrewd reliability. If in the beginning he had any notions of his own as to what a husband ought to be, he had discarded them in favour of Pauline's, and if as early as that he had devised any system of paying himself off for his complicity in her ideals, I didn't discover it. I saw Modjeska with Henry, in "Romeo and Juliet," and afterward stole away to a matinée by myself and saw her as Rosalind. I do not know now if she was the great artist she seemed, it is so long since I have seen her, but she sufficed. I had no words in which to express my extraordinary sense of possession in her, the profound, excluding intimacy of her art. Long after Henry Mills had gone to his connubial pillow I remained walking up and down in my room in a state of intense, inarticulate excitement. I did not think concretely of the stage nor of acting; what I had news of, was a country of large impulses and satisfying movement. I felt myself strong, had I but known the way, to set out for it. When I found sleep at last, it was to dream, not of the theatre, but of Helmeth Garrett. I was made aware of him first by a sense of fulness about my heart, and then I came upon him looking as he had looked last in the Willesden woods, writing at a table, a pale blur about him of the causeless light of dreams. I recognized the carpet underfoot as a favourite Taylorvillian selection, but overhead, red boughs of sycamore and oak depended through the dream-fogged atmosphere. I stood and read over his shoulder what he wrote, and though the words escaped me, the meaning of them put all straight between us. He turned as he wrote and looked at me with a look that set us back in the wrapt intimacy of the flaming forest ... somehow we had got there and found it softly dark! In the interval between my dream and morning, that kiss