"Unfortunately I've no talent."
"That would only make it the more respectable."
"You're just like poor Nick," Peter returned—"you've taken to imitating Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your contrasting me invidiously with Nick and in my giving up one career for another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your smelling-bottle—!" he concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to debate.
"Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing a very small part of the whole precious service, the protection and encouragement, for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a man interested in her work and as accomplished and determined as you very justly describe yourself."
"And would it be your idea that such a man should live on the money earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and still more determined wife?"
"Why not if they work together—if there's something of his spirit and his support in everything she does?" Miriam demanded. "Je vous attendais with the famous 'person'; of course that's the great stick they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have anything decent to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea, it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the clumsy body. Poor old 'person'—if you knew what we think of it! If you don't forget it that's your own affair: it shows you're dense before the idea."
"That I'm dense?"—and Peter appealed to their lamplit solitude, the favouring, intimate night that only witnessed his defeat, as if this outrage had been all that was wanting.
"I mean the public is—the public who pays us. After all, they expect us to look at them too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in the stalls before one for three mortal hours! I daresay it would be simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all showing ourselves all the while; only some of us are not worth paying."
"You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you," he said, his handsome face drawn by his pain to a contraction sufficiently attesting the fact. "Do you remember the second time I ever saw you—the day you recited at my place?" he abruptly asked; a good deal as if he were taking from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also one of the sharpest.
"Perfectly, and what an idiot I was, though it was only yesterday!"