could think of
nothing else. All his correspondence ceased. He read no more; he went no
more to his club. His only diversions were the rides and the lunches
which he took with Helen.

With her in the park he was a man transformed. His heaviness left him.
His tongue loosened, and together they rose above the toilsome level of
the rehearsal and abandoned themselves to the pure joy of being young.
Together they visited the exhibitions of painting and sculpture, and to
Helen these afternoons were a heavenly release from her own world.

It made no difference to her who objected to her friendship with
Douglass. After years of incredible solitude and seclusion and hard work
in the midst of multitudes of admirers and in the swift-beating heart of
cities, with every inducement to take pleasure, she had remained the
self-denying student of acting. Her summers had been spent in England or
France, where she saw no one socially and met only those who were
interested in her continued business success. Now she abandoned this
policy of reserve and permitted herself the joys of a young girl in
company with a handsome and honorable man, denying herself even to the
few.

She played badly during these three weeks, and Westervelt was both sad
and furious. Her joyous companionship with Douglass, her work on his
sane and wholesome drama, their discussions of what the stage should be
and do unfitted her for the factitious parts she was playing.

"I am going to drop all of these characters into the nearest abyss,"
she repeated each time with greater intensity. "I shall never play them
again after your drama is ready. My contract with Westervelt has really
expired so far as his exclusive control over me is concerned, and I will
not be coerced into a return to such work."

Her eyes were opened also to the effect of her characters on the
audiences that assembled night after night to hear her, and she began to
be troubled by the thousands of young girls who flocked to her matinees.
"Is it possible that what I call 'my art' is debasing to their bright
young souls?" she asked herself. "Is Mr. Douglass right? Am I
responsible?"

It was the depression of these moods which gave her corresponding
elation as she met her lover's clear, calm eyes of a morning, and walked
into the atmosphere of his drama, whose every line told for joy and
right living as well as for serious art.

Those were glorious days for her--the delicious surprise of her
surren