MELBOURNE, Australia -- Four straight double faults to blow a lead in the final set would be enough to set off a racket-throwing tantrum in anyone from a weekend hacker to a hardened pro.

Jennifer Capriati simply wiped her brow and went back to work, slugging shots as hard as she could until she put away No. 14 Dominique Van Roost 6-1, 4-6, 8-6 Wednesday night to reach the third round of the Australian Open.

	Jennifer Capriati celebrates her win over 14th-seeded Dominique Van Roost of Belgium on Wednesday night in Melbourne.

"You've got to get through it, and no matter what you're making, like four double faults in a row, you've just got to keep going for it," Capriati said.

For the "new" Jennifer Capriati at 23, there are no goals and no regrets, no future and no past, just the match on the court, the point on the scoreboard and the ball in front of her.

After all she's been through, she doesn't burden herself with expectations, her own or anyone else's. She tries her best to handle victory and defeat with equanimity.

It's all part of her one-day-at-time approach to life back on the tour.

So it was that Capriati could shake off that flurry of wildness even when it might appear to others that she was choking away the match with a 3-2, 40-love lead in the third set.

Four double faults and a backhand clunker that landed seven feet wide cost her the game. Four unforced errors on Van Roost's serve in the next game put Capriati behind 4-3.

But instead of flinging her racket or breaking down in tears or sulking to defeat, Capriati dug her way out of the jam by yielding only two points in her next two service games and breaking Van Roost for a 6-5 lead.

Double faults were contagious in this otherwise high-quality, hard-hitting match -- Van Roost had 11, Capriati 10 -- and Capriati produced another one while wasting a chance to serve out the match.

Again Capriati didn't fold. Instead, she bore down and broke Van Roost once more, then closed the match with her one and only ace.

Capriati, a quarterfinalist at the Australian in 1992 and 1993, won her first match in six years in this event last year before losing in the second round. Recently, she's been buoyed by victories over Martina Hingis and Mary Pierce in an exhibition in Hong Kong, and over No. 14 Sandrine Testud in a tournament in Sydney.

Capriati's ranking has climbed over the last seven months from No. 112 to No. 21 -- her highest since July 1994.

Little by little, Capriati can feel her game coming back, her movement improving, her aggressiveness increasing. Yet, she acknowledges she still doesn't have the confidence of the top players, like Lindsay Davenport, who know they can win a match even when they're down a couple of breaks.

Nor has she recaptured the feeling she had as a teenage sensation that anytime she goes on court she feels she will win.

"I'm really not quite there yet, where it's just kind of expected that I win the matches," she said. "Maybe when I start to get seeded there will be a little more expectation. Now it's like I'm really going to enjoy it while I still have this luxury of not having too much pressure. If I get high-ranked or become a seed, I'll have the same outlook.

"I just want to reach my highest potential, just get to what my best is. And whatever that is, that's great. It would be great to win a Grand Slam. Obviously that's why I'm playing -- to win. But I'm really not looking ahead. That's kind of my problem. I lose focus. This is the way I'm just going to keep focused."