“Achille is more than an artist, he is a philosopher,” said Harold. “What does he call this?” he glanced at the menu card. “‘Glace à la chagrin d’Achille’ What does he mean by that? ‘The chagrin of Achilles’? Where does the chagrin come in?”
“Oh, he has some story about a namesake of his,” said Archie. “He was cut up about something, and he wouldn’t come out of the marquee.”
“The tent,” cried Harold. “Achilles sulked in his tent. Of course, that’s the ‘chagrin d’Achille.’”
“Oh, you heard of it too? Then the story has managed to leak out somehow. They always do. There’s nothing in it. Now I’ll tell you all about the show. Try one of these figs.”
Harold helped himself to a green fig, the elderly butler placed a decanter of claret on the table, and disappeared with the noiselessness of a shadow.
CHAPTER XXX.—ON THE LEGITIMATE IN ART.
WHEN the history of the drama in England during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century comes to be written, the episode of the management of the Legitimate Theatre by Mrs. Mowbray will doubtless be amply treated from the standpoint of art, and the historian will, it may be confidently expected, lament the want of appreciation on the part of the public for the Shakespearian drama, to which the closing of the Legitimate Theatre was due.
There were a considerable number of persons, however, who showed a readiness to assert that the management of the Legitimate by Mrs. Mowbray should be looked upon as a purely—only purely was not the word they used—social incident, having no basis whatever in art. It failed, they said, not because the people of England had ceased to love Shakespeare, but because Mr. Archie Brown had ceased to love Mrs. Mowbray.