"Acting can never be learned, Monsieur.... It is a gift, of the good angels or the bad ones, which can be brought to perfection by use. To 'make' an artist of the stage is not possible. He or she is born ... and that is all I know...." She added: "When I make my appearance at the Théâtre Français, they shall send you a billet de faveur. Then you shall see acting. I promise you!"
She was more like Queen Titania than ever as she held up her fairy finger, and smiled and sparkled at the bewildered young man.
"For example, if MM. les Directeurs assign to me the part of a grandmother of sixty, do you think I shall put on wrinkles with paint? ... Non, merci! The true artist says to herself, 'I am old!' and she is old.... 'I am ugly!' and she becomes hideous. 'I am wicked!' See here!... Is this a face to regard with love, Monsieur?"
The last sentence had been croaked, rather than spoken. No Japanese mask of a witch could well have been more furrowed, puckered, scowling, or malignant than the face that had been Titania's a moment back. Breagh called out in protest, half angry, half amused, wholly fascinated; and Oberon's bright Queen came back again to say:
"Or I can be stupid, very stupid—if that will please you!... Gentlemen sometimes admire stupid girls.... We had one at the Convent—your countrywoman and a great heiress. Miss Smizz—the daughter of Smizz and Co., Tea Merchants, of Mincing Lane."
She banished all expression save a smile of absolute fatuity, puffed out her cheeks, narrowed her eyelids, permitting her eyes to twinkle through the merest slits. She giggled inanely, and said, combining the consonantal thickness of catarrh with the gobbling of a hen-turkey...
"All the eggstras.... Whad does expedse battere whed you've got a Forchud to fall bag od? Besides, Ba says I bust barry iddo the Beerage, ad accoblishbeds are dod usually expegded of a doblebad's wife!"
She added, in her own voice, summarily banishing Miss Smith, her expectations, and her splutter:
"Do not be vexed with me, Monsieur Breagh, I beg of you!... I am perhaps a little excited. There is something strange in the air.... I have a humming in my ears as though great crowds of people were talking very softly.... What is it?" she asked in bewilderment, pressing the fine points of her small fingers into her temples. "What is the matter with me to-night?..."
Then P. C. Breagh spoke out, in a tone that hurled a challenge to Destiny: