It was about a month after this that I began to find myself pitted against Miss Dean in a struggle for some dimly grasped advantage, with the dice cogged against me. I saw myself in the general estimate, convinced of handling my game badly, and could form no guess even at the expected moves. I smarted under a sense that Manager O'Farrell was not backing up the friendliness of our relations, and I remember saying to Sarah Croyden once that I suspected Miss Dean was using her sex attraction against me, but I missed the point of Sarah's slow, commiserating smile. At the time we were all more or less swamped by the discomforts of our wintry flights from town to town, execrable hotels, irregular and unsatisfying meals. One and another of us went down with colds, and finally toward the end of February, I was taken with a severe neuralgia. It reached its acutest stage the first night we played at Louisville. I had hurried home from the theatre the moment I was released from my part, to find relief from it in rest, but an hour or two later, still suffering and discovering that I had taken all my powders, I decided to go down to Sarah's room on the lower floor to ask for some that I knew she had. I slipped on my shoes and a thick gray dressing gown, and taking the precaution of wrapping my head in a shawl against the draughty halls, I went down to her. I was returning with the box of powders in my hand when I was startled by the sound of a door lifting carefully on the latch. The hotel was built in the shape of a capital T, with the stair halfway of the stem. I was almost at the foot of it facing the cross hall that gave me a view of the door of Miss Dean's room, and I saw now that it was slightly ajar. I shrank instinctively into the shadow of the recess where the stair began, for I was unwilling that anybody should see the witch I looked in my dressing gown and shawl. In the interval before the door widened I heard the tick of a tin-faced clock just across from me. Part of the enamel was fallen away from the face of it so that it looked as if eaten upon by discreditable sores; a chandelier holding two smoky kerosene lamps hung slightly awry at the crossing of the T, and cast a tipsy shadow. The door swung back slightly, it opened into the room, and a man came out of it and crossed directly in front of me, probably to his room in the other arm of the T. Once out of the door it snapped softly to behind him, and the man fell instantly into a manner that disconnected him with it to a degree that could only have been possible to an accomplished actor. If I had not seen him come out of it, I should have supposed him abroad upon such a casual errand as my own. But there was no mistaking that it was Manager O'Farrell. By the tin-faced clock it was a quarter past one. And he would have been home from the theatre more than an hour!