“And what form of creative expression do you adopt, Mr. Macquoid?” I asked gracefully.
He replied with a modest diffidence:
“The drama. One is but a mouthpiece—a medium; yet the speech from living lips with the living person before the eyes——”
“You are doubtless right,” I replied; “words are unconvincing; things must be seen to be believed.”
He noticed nothing, and proceeded to speak of the modern French chansonette.
Now Caroline, I remembered, had, before her engagement, accounted for a large portion of her time in putting together the materials for a comedy, which, however, she had since discontinued under the somewhat exclusive demands of courtship. I had never been privileged to see the work in question, but understood that a knotty proposal scene had, coincidentally, been abandoned precisely at the time that she could, had she wished, have given it an autobiographical interest. Bassishaw’s love, besides interrupting the course of art, bade fair to cut it off altogether just when it would have given the true note that the stage, it is declared, is aching for. But even young authors have scruples in making their own affairs public, and so Caroline had willed it.
Nevertheless, it could do Caroline no harm to meet Mr. Eleanor Macquoid; and Mr. Macquoid himself could do no less than accept resignedly the latter-day limitations of love in the presence of my sister. After all, Mrs. Vicars’s salon was for the interchange of ideas.
“My sister,” I remarked, “is interested in the drama, and has herself half-realised aspirations in the way of comedy.”
Mr. Macquoid would be charmed; and I presented him. I was called away for a few moments by Mrs. Vicars. By the time I returned Mr. Macquoid was talking, his remarks being apparently directed to the point at which Caroline’s comedy had been relinquished.
“It is difficult,” he observed, with a polite interest, “to know what to do with one’s young leads nowadays. I suppose they must love—the Philistine still clings to the conventional love-theme—but it is all so stale. In the old days it was different.”