"What indeed?" Nick echoed. "But if we need them it's because we're not superior persons. We're awful Philistines."
"I'll be one with you," the girl smiled. "Poor Nash isn't worth talking about. What was it but a small question of action when he preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?"
"Yes, he has a weakness for giving up—he'll go with you as far as that. But I'm not giving up any more, you see. I'm pegging away, and that's gross."
"He's an idiot—n'en parlons plus!" she dropped, gathering up her parasol but lingering.
"Ah I stick to him," Nick said. "He helped me at a difficult time."
"You ought to be ashamed to confess it."
"Oh you are a Philistine!" Nick returned.
"Certainly I am," she declared, going toward the door—"if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't tell people I've said so they'll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like in patient obscurity while I'm pitchforked into the mêlée and into the most improbable fame—all on the back of a solitary cheval de bataille, a poor broken-winded screw. I read it clear that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days—do you see that?—to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, making a success of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall have had—five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that's what I should have liked. I think I'm disgusting with my successful crudities. It's discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use, in such an age, of being good?"
"Good? Your haughty claim," Nick laughed, "is that you're bad."
"I mean good, you know—there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And Miriam tapped him—he was near her at the door—with her parasol.