"I ask for recognition, not because recognition is in itself a hall mark of success, but because without it labour would seem to be wasted. What is the use of a great poem, a great book, which remains unread? A gospel is no gospel until it is preached to thousands."
"Don't set your heart on this play being produced!"
"I have set my heart on that, Tommy."
"If Sybil takes a fancy to you——" he paused.
Mark's ingenuous stare was disconcerting. He continued lightly: "I warn you that she may like you better than Fenella. It would not surprise me if she liked you rather too well."
"Don't be a fool," said Mark angrily.
"If I could only be a fool," Greatorex murmured. "Depend upon it fools have the best of it. And they live, some of 'em, in the only paradise to be found on this planet. Well, I have spoken, I have warned you."
Upon the following day Mark returned at the hour appointed to Mrs. Perowne's flat. The butler, impassive as the Sphinx, showed him into the same room with its curious atmosphere of the East. In a few minutes the actress appeared in a kimono of some silvery tissue embroidered in gold, with her hair done à la Japonaise, and embellished with barbaric ornaments. Clad in this she became a part, and the greatest part, of the room. Looking at her, Mark felt ill at ease in his blue serge suit. At the same time he tried to measure the difference between the woman in the kimono and all other women whom he had known. Mrs. Perowne smiled, reading his thoughts.
"I am quite, quite different to all the others," she said softly. "I ought to have lived in the days of Herod Antipas."
When she spoke of Herod, Mark remembered that she had Jewish blood in her veins. Her father had been a well-known English picture-dealer; her mother, a famous dancer, a Spanish Moor. Her Moorish ancestors, of whom the actress boasted, were Jews to the marrow, although living in Spain, outwardly subject to the faith of most Catholic monarchs. For generations these people had lived and died incomparable actors, sustaining from the cradle to the grave a rôle above which glittered the knives of the Inquisition. Mark began to understand that the woman smiling at him was natural, most true to herself, when playing a part—and yet beneath a thousand disguises throbbed the heart of the Jewess, the child of all countries and of none.