I got up to my room somehow; I think my neuralgia must have left me with the shock; I can't remember feeling it any more after that. You have to remember that this was my first actual contact with sin of any sort. Generations of the stock of Methodism revolted in me. I had liked the man, I had thought of our relation as something precious, to be kept intact because it nourished the quality of our art, and I had all the conventional woman's horror of being brought in touch with looseness. It was part of the admitted business of the men of my class to keep their women from such contacts, and Manager O'Farrell had allowed me to enter into a sort of rivalry with a shameless woman--with his mistress. I have always been what the country people in Ohianna call a knowledgable woman, I have not much faculty of getting news of a situation through the facts as they present themselves, but I have instincts which under the stimulus of emotion work with extraordinary celerity and thoroughness. Now suddenly the half-apprehended suggestion of the last few months took fire from the excitement of my mind, and exploded into certainties. I sensed all at once intolerable things, the withholden eyes, the covert attention fixed on my relations with the manager and Miss Dean. I lay on the bed and shuddered with dry sobs; other times I lay still, awake and blazing. About daylight Sarah came up to inquire how my neuralgia did. She found me with the unopened box clutched tightly in my hand. She turned up the smoky gas and noted the dark circles under my eyes. "What has happened? Something, I know," she insisted gently. I blurted it out. "Mr. O'Farrell ... I saw him come out of Miss Dean's room ... at a quarter of one. He was ... oh, Sarah ... he was!..." I relapsed again into the horror of it. "Oh!" she said. She turned out the light and came and forced me gently under the covers and got into bed beside me. "Didn't you know?" she questioned. "Did you?" "No one really knows these things. I didn't want to be the first to suggest it to you." "Do the others know?" "As much as we do. It has been going on a long time." "And you put up with it--you go about with them?" I was astonished at the welling up of disgust in me. Sarah felt for my hand and held it. "My dear, in our business you have to learn to take no notice. It is not that these things are so much worse with actors, but it is more difficult to keep them covered up. You must know that a great many people do such things." "I know--_wicked_ people. I never thought of its being done by anybody you liked." "Oh, yes;" she was perfectly simple. "You can like them, you can like them greatly." I remembered that I oughtn't to have said that to Sarah Croyden.