And Cyril Adair? It was hard to imagine him in private life except as Corrèze. But, of course, he wasn’t Corrèze--that was absurd. Perhaps he would be so changed that one would scarcely know him on the street. She had heard of such disillusions--of tottering old men playing boys--and wasn’t Bernhardt sixty? But a woman can tell, a woman who--who--cares. That vigorous manhood was no made-up pretense; such freshness, such warmth, such grace, could not be affected; he was certainly not much more than thirty, on the border line of youth and early-maturity when men, to her, possessed their greatest charm.
Lying there, in a swoon of shy delight, she allowed her fancy to fly away in dreams. Hand in hand, they trod a fairy-land of love and rapture. She stole sentences from his part, and made him repeat them to her alone--avowals, passionate and tender, in all the mellow sweetness of the voice that still reëchoed in her heart. He was Corrèze, and she, in the madness of her infatuation, had forced her way to him and thrown herself humbly at his feet. His love was not for her; she aspired to no such heights; but she had come to be his little slave; to follow him in his wanderings; to sleep across his door, and guard him while he slept. To be near him was all she asked. His little slave, who, when he was dejected and weary, would nestle beside him, and cover his hand with the softest kisses. She wanted no reward; she would try not to be jealous of those great ladies, though there would be times when she could not hold back her feelings, and his hand, as she drew it across her eyes, would be all wet with tears.
With her maid’s knock at the door there came a sudden revulsion. Phyllis called to her to go away, unwilling to be seen in her defenselessness, and fearful of she knew not what. But the spell was broken. The bubble of that pretty fantasy vanished at one touch of fact. Harsh reality obtruded itself, and with it a pitiless self-arraignment. She had been swept off her feet by a third-class actor, in a third-class play, full of mawkish sentiment and unreality, in a third-class theater where they chewed gum, and ate apples while they wept over the hero’s woes! A wave of self-disgust rose within her. She felt soiled, humiliated. How dared this cheap, showy creature reach out to take such liberties with a woman a thousand times above him? A creature, who in all probability ate with his knife, carried on low love affairs with admiring shop-girls, and practised his fascinations before a mirror, like a trick-monkey! Pah, the thought of her amorous imaginings reddened her cheeks, and consumed her with bitterness and shame. Where was her self-respect, her modesty? If wishes could have killed, there would have been no performance of _Moths_ that night at the Thalia Theater.