When she saw Ishmael in his own environment, then she would know whether it were worth it or not.... To blot herself out of existence for a few weeks, that was what it amounted to; there should be no such person as the town-ridden Blanche Nevill on the face of the earth. She felt a delightful stirring of anticipation, and nothing had had power to awaken that emotion in her for several years. Her own surroundings once shed, she would, she felt, meet a new world with all the hopes and dreams that had once been hers. She was twenty-six years of age, though with her bland face she looked much younger; and the truth was she had no love for any work in itself, but only for the praise it brought her--a temperament which can never make the artist, but results in the brilliant amateur. She was sick of the stage, for no worthy captive of her bow and spear had presented himself, and she detected the dawning of criticism in the friends that had been so warm when she first met them in town. Blanche was always posing, and people had found it out. As a child she had played the misunderstood genius or shy mother's darling as occasion demanded; she had posed with others till she was unable to do anything but pose with herself. A few years, a very few years, ago, and even her own sex had had to admit her charm; now she was beginning to be played out, and she knew it. Her triumphant personality always attracted attention, even when prettier and cleverer women were present, but it was a very critical attention she attracted now. When the light faded she moved to the bed and began to brush out her hair. The sun had set, and she had drawn the dark, narrow blinds; down their edges showed the gleam of the outside world steeped in a cold blue-green light like the depths of the sea, and the faded curtains wavered slowly in the breeze like long swaying strips of seaweed. Blanche, swathed in a pale wrapper and sitting on the bed whose whiteness was dimmed by the greenish dusk, was suggestive of a stage mermaid combing her locks upon a property sandbank. She lit her lamp, and at once the gleam without turned a deep, soft blue. She knotted her pale hair on the nape of her neck, and, chin up, hands on hips, stared critically at herself in the glass, and, as she looked her lips parted a little in pleasure. Snatching up the hand-glass, she poised from one foot to the other, craning her neck to see herself from every possible point of view. "Yes," she decided, "I'll go. And then--a new life. Miss Blanche Nevill will vanish into thin air, and hurrah! for Blanche Grey, who will be--herself."