“Oh! He only means they’re making business bad for him.”
“Your uncle says you’ll never make an actress, Matilda.”
“Does he?”
(Some one behind them said “Ssh!”
“Ssh yourself,” retorted Matilda. “There ain’t nothing to hear.”)
“Does he?” she said. “What do you think?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”
For the first time he noted that when he was with Matilda his brain worked in an entirely novel fashion. It was no longer cool and fastidiously analytical, seizing on things and phenomena from the outside, but strangely excited and heated, athletic and full of energy and almost rapturously curious about the inside of things and their relation one with another. For instance, he had hitherto regarded the kinematograph as a sort of disease that had broken out all over the face of the world, but now his newly working mind, his imagination—that was the word for it—saw it as human effort, as a thing controlled by human wills to meet human demands. It did not satisfy his own demand, nor apparently did it satisfy Matilda’s. For the rest of the audience he would not venture to decide. Indeed he gave little thought to them, for he was entirely absorbed by the wonder of the miracle that had come to him, the new vision of life, the novel faculty of apprehension. He was in a state of ferment and could not sort his impressions and ideas, but he was quite marvelously interested in himself, and, casting about for expression of it all, he remembered stories of seeds buried for years under mighty buildings in cities and how when the buildings were pulled down those seeds put forth with new vigor and came to flower. So (he said to himself) it had been with him. Excitedly he turned to Matilda and said:
“About this acting. Do you yourself think you can do it?”
“I’m sure I can.”