And if only she could have believed her own vision, the outlines of the underlying thing she wanted were beginning to appear, as in a half developed negative.  It hadn’t been from a cold sense of duty, or from a cold fear of losing her job, that she had thrown herself into the accomplishment of John Galbraith’s wishes, or had felt that almost fierce desire that some effect he was trying for and that she understood, should get an objective validity.  It hadn’t been out of pure altruism that she’d spent those twelve solid hours compelling Olga Larson to talk better.  She might have felt sorry for the girl—­might have loaned her money, comforted her; but she wouldn’t have locked her in her room and beaten down her sullen opposition, set her afire with her own vitality, except that it was a thing that had to be done for the good of the show.

In short, she was, to fall back on Rodney’s phrase again, for the first time driving herself with the motive power of her own desires—­riding the back of a hitherto unsuspected passion.  But the binding force of that fixed idea of hers had been sufficient all along to keep up the delusion of unreality about the real half of her life and to make the nightmare half of it seem true.

It wasn’t until she heard herself telling John Galbraith that she could design those costumes for him, and in a flame of suddenly kindled excitement, resolved to make that unexpected promise good, that the fetters of her false logic fell away from her.

The truth of the matter, the wonderful, almost incredible truth, kept coming up brighter and clearer as she walked silently along beside him down the avenue.  The real beginning of the pilgrimage that was to carry her back into her husband’s life, wasn’t a thing that had to be waited for.  It could begin now!  No, the truth was better than that; it had begun already!  Because if John Galbraith had come to her house a month ago, when she was casting about so desperately for a way of earning a living, and had offered her the chance just as he had offered it to-night, she’d have declined it.  She wouldn’t have known what he wanted.  She’d rightly have said that the thing was utterly beyond her powers.  To-night she knew what he wanted and she was utterly confident of her ability to give it to him.

And the one word that blaze of confidence spelled for her in letters of fire, was her husband’s name.  This chance that had been offered her was a ladder that would enable her to climb part of the way back to him.  Her accomplishment of this first breathlessly exciting task would be a thing, when it was achieved, that she could recount to him—­well, as man to man.  Her success, if she succeeded—­and the alternative was something she wouldn’t contemplate—­would compel the same sort of respect from him that he accorded to a diagnosis of James Randolph’s, or an article of Barry Lake’s.