She consumed the night thus--fearing it, avoiding its quiet reflections, stopping her ears to its whispers of rules learned in childhood; afraid to face God, who, in her simple superstitious faith, was ever personal. She felt that if she did not recall herself to Him, God, who had so much to do, would not notice her. When she returned, she fell at once into profound, dream-driven sleep from which she woke at noon, heavy and incredulous, arousing herself into a febrile energy, impatient for the whirling day to start. At the foot of the alcove she had placed an enormous calendar; and each night, on entering, she tore off another sheet--counting the days that yet intervened before the coming tenth of March. In the whole room she saw nothing but these looming figures, black against white, marking her little allotted hours. She had so little time left to revel and dare, to skirt the edge of precipices or tease the leaping flames ... such a little while to be just Dodo. The pace she set began to tell on her vitality, to proclaim itself in the hollowing of her cheeks and the strained cords of the neck. Her eyes were never quiet, nor could her body find an instant's repose. Snyder, who had succeeded to Winona's room, perceived the danger, as did Massingale; but to the remonstrances of each Doré would run to the calendar, half laughing, half serious, drumming on it with her little fist, crying: "Pretty soon--pretty soon. Can't stop now! Soon it'll be over!" It was not simply three or four intrigues that she drove at once, but a dozen, keeping the threads from tangling, adding new ones each night, for a few days' mystification and abandonment. Yet, despite the nerve-racking and exhaustion, never had she felt so triumphant or known herself so desirable. The city which once had crushed her imagination in the first despair of her arrival, the city which she felt in all its moods, grumbling, defiant, waiting cruelly, submissive or ominous, now rolled before her in a brilliant succession of pleasures, her world and her destiny--theater and restaurant, opera and cabaret; and everywhere, in the burst of lights, or languidly sunk in the seduction of music, in the lure of shop-windows was the zest of precious temptations--dangers that it was an ecstasy to be able to reject. Everything succeeded for her: Massingale, Blood, Sassoon the patient, Gilday, Stacey and dozens of others. She managed as she wished, arranged her day so that they never crossed one another, and yet leaping from one dramatization to another. Never had she felt so confident of the mastery of her destinies, so avid of the delicious draft of pleasure. She felt that she was coming to a supreme sacrifice, self-immolation, but that the setting was superb and the climax must be magnificent!