“Probably,” Lee Randon added keenly, “it was to happen because you were so excessively beautiful.” There was no reply to this. “I don't need to tell you,” he admitted, “that I did my best to discourage him; and I pointed out that the time must come when you would fancy, no, need, someone else.”
“Oh, that was cruel!” she cried softly; “and it isn't, it won't be true. Do you think, just because I happen to be an actress, that I can't be faithful?”
“It is all a question of degree,” he instructed her, “of talent or genius. Talent may be faithful to a number of things—a man or a country or even an ideal; but the only fidelity of genius is to itself.”
“I hadn't thought of that,” she reflected, sadly.
“Why should you?” he demanded; “you are being natural; I am the disturbance, the conventional voice sentimentally reading from the call book. But you don't have those in moving pictures: it would be a sentimentally stupid director. You must believe me: your acting will always be incomprehensible to Peyton: he will approve of the results and raise hell—for the comparatively short time he will last—with the means. Tell me this: together with his conviction that you'd carry the stage up into heaven, didn't he speak of your retiring?”
The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical variety of purposes. “In the end,” he insisted, “Peyton will want to take you to a home in a correct suburb; that conception he'll never get away from.” She answered:
“And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn't think my life is entirely joyful.”
“I don't,” he as promptly assured her; “but you will never get away from it; you will never sit contentedly through long afternoons playing bridge; you're cursed, if you want to call it that.”
“I saw Peyton's child,” she said at a tangent. “He had hold of the nurse's apron in such a funny decided fist. I wanted to hug him, but I remembered that it wasn't the thing to do. She has that,” a shade of defiance darkened her voice at her reference to Claire.
“Babies are no longer overwhelmingly important,” Lee retorted; “not in the face of emotion itself; they have become a sort of unavoidable, almost an undesirable by-product.”