"Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the finality of her tone thrilling him through with a hollow, sickening note.
Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget that I, too, live the calculating life."
There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in her utterance of the word "calculating."
"The key to my life is not love; it cannot be love," she went on. "I am not the purring kitten you have described. It angers me to have you think so. I am not a thing to love and fondle. I am a tigress tearing at one object. I am," and in the vehement force of her utterance she seemed to grow tall and terrible, "I am an ambitious woman! An unscrupulous, designing, clambering, ambitious woman!"
"But I love you, Marien," John iterated weakly.
"There is no place for love in the calculating life," she rejoined unhesitatingly. "Love is a thing incalculable." Yet as she uttered this sentence, her tone softened, and her eyes had a look of awe and hunger oddly mixed in them; but immediately the expression of resolute ambition succeeded to her features.
"When I am at the top," she proposed loftily.
"But the better part of life may be gone then," John protested bitterly. "The top! When shall we reach the top?"
"I shall reach it in a bound when my opportunity comes," Marien answered with cool assurance. "Nobody, not even myself, knows how good I am. Any night some man may sit in front who has both the judgment to see and the money to command playwrights, theaters, New York appearances to order. When they come, I shall conquer. Oh," and her eyes sparkled while she shivered with a thrill of self-gratulation, "it is wonderful to feel the great potential thing inside of you, to know that your wings are strong enough to fly and you only wait the coming of the breeze. It is dazzling, intoxicating, to think that within three months I may be a Broadway star; that within a year the whole English-speaking world may recognize that a new queen of the emotional drama and of tragedy has been crowned. Until that hour," and she lowered her voice as she checked the exaltation of her mood, "until that hour a lover would be a millstone."
"But," exulted John, "you are not at the top yet. I may arrive first!"