“How could I?”
He looked at her steadily, a certain grave concentration of thought manifest in his dark eyes. Berenice was looking her best that afternoon. She was certainly a very beautiful and a very distinguished-looking woman. Her eyes met his frankly; her lips were curved in a faintly tender smile.
“Well, I hardly know,” he said. “You are going to be a popular actress. Henceforth the stage will have claims upon you! It will become your career.”
“You have plenty of confidence.”
“I have absolute confidence in you,” he declared, “and Fergusson is equally confident about the play; chance has given you this opportunity—the result is beyond question! Yet I confess that I have a presentiment. If the manuscript of ‘The Heart of the People’ were in my hands at this moment, I think that I would tear it into little pieces, and watch them flutter down on to the pavement there.”
“I do not understand you,” she said softly. “You say that you have no doubt——”
“It is because I have no doubt—it is because I know that it will make you a popular and a famous actress. You will gain this. I wonder what you will lose.”
She moved restlessly on her chair.
“Why should I lose anything?”
“It is only a presentiment,” he reminded her. “I pray that you may not lose anything. Yet you are coming under a very fascinating influence. It is your personality I am afraid of. You are going to belong definitely to a profession which is at once the most catholic and the most narrowing in the world. I believe that you are strong enough to stand alone, to remain yourself. I pray that it may be so, and yet, there is just the shadow of the presentiment. Perhaps it is foolish.”