Watching the rehearsals she was able to relax so that when at night she had her own performance to give she felt fresh.
She realized that all Michael had said was true. She took hold of herself.
Thrusting her private emotion into the background and thus getting the character under control, she managed once more to play with her accustomed virtuosity.
Her acting ceased to be a means by which she gave release to her feelings and was again the manifestation of her creative instinct.
She got a quiet exhilaration out of thus recovering mastery over her medium.
It gave her a sense of power and of liberation.
But the triumphant effort she made took it out of her, and when she was not in the theatre she felt listless and discouraged.
She lost her exuberant vitality.
A new humility overcame her.
She had a feeling that her day was done.
She sighed as she told herself that nobody wanted her any more.
Michael suggested that she should go to Vienna to be near Roger, and she would have liked that, but she shook her head.
‘I should only cramp his style.’
She was afraid he would find her a bore.
He was enjoying himself and she would only be in the way.
She could not bear the thought that he would find it an irksome duty to take her here and there and occasionally have luncheon or dinner with her.
It was only natural that he should have more fun with the friends of his own age that he had made.
She decided to go and stay with her mother.
Mrs Lambert—Madame de Lambert, as Michael insisted on calling her—had lived for many years now with her sister, Madame Falloux, at St Malo.
She spent a few days every year in London with Julia, but this year had not been well enough to come.
She was an old lady, well over seventy, and Julia knew that it would be a great joy for her to have her daughter on a long visit.
Who cared about an English actress in Vienna?
She wouldn’t be anyone there.
In St Malo she would be something of a figure, and it would be fun for the two old women to be able to show her off to their friends.
‘Ma fille, la plus grande actrice d’Angleterre,’ and all that sort of thing.
Poor old girls, they couldn’t live much longer and they led drab, monotonous lives.
Of course it would be fearfully boring for her, but it would be a treat for them.
Julia had a feeling that perhaps in the course of her brilliant and triumphant career she had a trifle neglected her mother.
She could make up for it now.
She would lay herself out to be charming.
Her tenderness for Michael and her ever-present sense of having been for years unjust to him filled her with contrition.
She felt that she had been selfish and overbearing, and she wanted to atone for all that.
She was eager to sacrifice herself, and so wrote to her mother to announce her imminent arrival.
She managed in the most natural way in the world to see nothing of Tom till her last day in London.
The play had closed the night before and she was starting for St Malo in the evening.
Tom came in about six o’clock to say good-bye to her.
Michael was there, Dolly, Charles Tamerley and one or two others, so that there was no chance of their being left even for a moment by themselves.
Julia found no difficulty in talking to him naturally.
To see him gave her not the anguish she had feared but no more than a dull heartache.
They had kept the date and place of her departure secret, that is to say, the Press representative of the theatre had only rung up a very few newspapers, so that when Julia and Michael reached the station there were not more than half a dozen reporters and three camera-men.
Julia said a few gracious words to them, and Michael a few more, then the Press representative took the reporters aside and gave them a succinct account of Julia’s plans.
Meanwhile Julia and Michael posed while the cameramen to the glare of flashes photographed them arm in arm, exchanging a final kiss, and at last Julia, half out of the carriage window, giving her hand to Michael who stood on the platform.
‘What a nuisance these people are,’ she said.
‘One simply cannot escape them.’
‘I can’t imagine how they knew you were going.’
The little crowd that had assembled when they realized that something was going on stood at a respectful distance.
The Press representative came up and told Michael he thought he’d given the reporters enough for a column.
The train steamed out.
Julia had refused to take Evie with her.
She had a feeling that in order to regain her serenity she must cut herself off completely for a time from her old life.