"What about my clothes?" another interruption.
"Never touching a penny of it," went on Hepworth firmly, ignoring these asides on her part, "until you have saved enough to finance yourself. Isn't that reasonable?"
"Ye-s," admitted Fuschia. "It is a very reasonable and sensible suggestion, Mr. Hepworth, that is," thoughtfully, "if you leave out father and me. But just get it into your head that at the moment I'd save a nice little heap, father would be hit with an overwhelming impulse to back the wrong horse, and, here's something awfully queer psychologically, Mr. Hepworth, I'd know as sure as I'm Fuschia Fleming that it was the wrong horse, and yet, I'd get inoculated with the mental virus before I'd know it, and beg him to let me in on it. And you know that father is incapable of staking half or even two thirds of his little all against any proposition he believes in. The only thing that can satisfy him and make his blood tingle is to stake the whole. No limit but the blue canopy of heaven. Limits do fret father."
Mr. Hepworth slightly lifted his shoulders. Then he dropped another lump of sugar into a cup of hot tea she had given him.
"I wish to seem neither irrelevant nor impertinent," he said at last, "but can you act?"
Miss Fuschia Fleming threw up her white chin and laughter bubbled unquenchable from her throat, not vain-glorious mirth, as if the fact of her superlative achievement mocked his crude question, but the unrestrained laughter of genuine amusement.
"The idea of asking an actress such a question," she said at last, touching each eye lightly and deftly with a delicate handkerchief. "You may thank your lucky stars that I don't nearly drown you with picturesque and highly colored tales of my triumphs and then hurl the full scrap-book at you. My, but you are a rash man! To ask a professional if she can act!" Again her full-throated laughter rang out delightfully and so heartily that it shook the petals from the cluster of pale golden roses she wore on her breast.
"But look here, seriously now," her laughter died quickly away, her face assumed a gravity he had not dreamed her mobile features could express, her gaze fastened upon him with a sort of hungry, passionate eagerness.
"That was a horrible question of yours," she shivered, as if the breeze blowing over the gardens from the Elysian sea chilled her. "One should know intuitively, instinctively whether an actress can act or not. Good Lord!" she brought her hand down on the table. "If you don't feel it, know it, beyond all argument, why it isn't there, that's all.
"Unless I set you dreaming, unless I suggest in this or that varying pose or expression, the whole world of women, I'm not a born actress. Training, study can make a good mechanical nightingale of me, a clever imitation of the real thing. That's all. But unless I have the chameleon quality of reflecting my part, the unerring understanding of any type of woman I may be called upon to represent, how can I be an actress? What does it profit me to give the public a carefully studied, intellectual representation of Portia or Nora, or Juliet or Candida, wide apart as the poles as they may be? I must not only apprehend them, I must be them in every fibre of my being, in every cell of my brain, in every beat of my heart, or I'm nothing. Unless I can convince you that Camille and I are one in emotion and view of life, and then obliterate that impression when I speak to you as Rosalind, why I'm not an actress, not the kind I care to be, anyway."