“Are our paths diverging, Gerty? and if that is so, what will be the end of it for me and for you?  Are you going away from me?  After all that has passed, are we to be separated in the future, and you will go one way and I must go the other way, with all the world between us, so that I shall never see you again?  Why will you not speak?  You hint of lingering doubts and hesitations.  Why have you not the courage to be true to yourself—­to be true to your woman’s heart—­to take your life in your own hands, and shape it so that it shall be worthy of you?”

Well, she did speak in answer to this piteous prayer.  She was a skilful letter-writer: 

“It may seem very ungrateful in an actress, you know, dear Keith, to contest the truth of anything said by Shakespeare; but I don’t think, with all humility, there ever was so much nonsense put into so small a space as there is in these lines that everybody quotes at your head—­

                 “To thine own self be true
    And it must follow, as the night the day
    Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

“‘Be true to yourself,’ people say to you.  But surely every one who is conscious of failings, and deceitfulness, and unworthy instincts, would rather try to be a little better than himself?  Where else would there be any improvement, in an individual or in society?  You have to fight against yourself, instead of blindly yielding to your wish of the moment.  I know I, for one, should not like to trust myself.  I wish to be better than I am—­to be other than I am—­and I naturally look around for help and guidance.  Then, you find people recommending you absolutely diverse ways of life, and with all show of authority and reason, too; and in such an important matter ought not one to consider before making a final choice?”

Miss White’s studies in mental and moral science, as will readily be perceived, had not been of a profound character.  But he did not stay to detect the obvious fallacy of her argument.  It was all a maze of words to him.  The drowning man does not hear questions addressed to him.  He only knows that the waters are closing over him, and there is no arm stretched out to save.

“I do not know myself for two minutes together,” she wrote.  “What is my present mood, for example?  Why, one of absolute and ungovernable hatred—­hatred of the woman who would take my place if I were to retire from the stage.  I have been thinking of it all the morning—­picturing myself as an unknown nonentity, vanished from the eyes of the public, in a social grave.  And I have to listen to people praising the new actress; and I have to read columns about her in the papers; and I am unable to say, ‘Why, all that and more was written and said about me!’ What has an actress to show for herself if once she leaves the stage?  People forget her the next day; no record is kept of her triumphs.  A painter, now, who spends years of his life in earnest study—­it