She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to
vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns. She could
hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a
career, if it were in her to achieve greatness. Pleasant dreams in which
the buoyant ego soared, until the logical interpretation of her
ambitions brought her to a more practical consideration of ways and
means, and that in turn confronted her with the fact that she could
leave the Pacific coast to-morrow morning if she so chose.
Why should she not so choose?
She was her own mistress, free as the wind. Fyfe had said that. She
looked out into the smoky veil that shrouded the water front and the
hills across the Inlet, that swirled and eddied above the giant fir in
Stanley Park, and her mind flicked back to Roaring Lake where the Red
Flower of Kipling's _Jungle Book_ bloomed to her husband's ruin. Did it?
She wondered. She could not think of him as beaten, bested in any
undertaking. She had never been able to think of him in those terms.
Always to her he had conveyed the impression of a superman. Always she
had been a little in awe of him, of his strength, his patient,
inflexible determination, glimpsing under his habitual repression
certain tremendous forces. She could not conceive him as a broken man.
Staring out into the smoky air, she wondered if the fires at Roaring
Lake still ravaged that noble forest; if Fyfe's resources, like her
brother's, were wholly involved in standing timber, and if that timber
were doomed? She craved to know.
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