Yes, there was a superficial fairness to the picture, Vane admitted. If only, if only, he had not chosen to look under the surface! Now that he had seen the world with other eyes, its fairness could rarely seem the same to him.
A sturdy beggar approached him, with a whine that proved him an admirable actor. But Vane could not find it in him to reflect that if there is one thing more than another that lends distinction to a town it is an abundance of beggars.
He wondered how it would be to annex this healthy impostor's mite of a soul. But no; there could be little wisdom gained there.
He made, finally, for the Town and Country Club, and tried to immerse himself in the conversation that sped about. The talked turned to the eminent actor, Arthur Wantage. The subject of that man's alleged eccentricities invariably brought out a flood of the town's stalest anecdotes. Vane, listening in a lazy mood, made up his mind to see Wantage play that night. It would be a distraction. It would show him, once again, the present limit in one human being's portraiture of another; he would see the highest point to which external imitation could be brought; he could contrast it with the heights to which he himself had ascended.
It would be a chance for him to consider Wantage, for the first time in his life, as a merely second-rate actor. This player was an adept only in the making the shell, the husk, seem lifelike; since he could not read the character, how could he go deeper?
The opportunities the theatre held for him suddenly loomed vast before Vane.
CHAPTER XIII.
The fact that Arthur Wantage was to be seen and heard, nightly, in a brilliant comedy by the author of "Pious Aeneas," was not so much the attraction that drew people to his theatre, as was the fact that he had not yet, that season, delivered himself of a curtain speech. His curtain speeches were wont to be insults delivered in an elaborately honeyed manner; he took the pose of considering his audiences with contempt; he admired himself far more for his condescension in playing to them than he respected his audiences for having the taste to admire him.
The comedy in which he was now appearing was the perfection of paradox. It pretended to be frivolous and was really philosophic. The kernel of real wisdom was behind the elaborately poised mask of wit. A delightful impertinence and exaggeration informed every line of the dialogue. The pose of inimitable, candid egoism showed under every situation. The play was typical of the author as well as of the player. It veiled, as thinly as possible, a deal of irony at the expense of the play going public; it took some of that public's dearest foibles and riddled them to shreds.