Robin Pierce smiled in the dark and thrust his hands deep down in the pockets of his overcoat.
“I don’t know,” Sir Donald resumed, after a slight pause, “I don’t know what is your—whether you care much for beauty in its innumerable forms. Many young men don’t, I believe.”
“I do,” said Robin. “My mother is an Italian, you know, and not an Italian Philistine.”
“Then you can help me, perhaps. Does Lady Holme care for beauty? But she must. It is impossible that she does not.”
“Do you think so? Why?”
“I really cannot reconcile myself to the idea that such performances as hers are matters of chance.”
“They are not. Lady Holme is not a woman who chances things before the cruel world in which she, you and I live, Sir Donald.”
“Exactly. I felt sure of that. Then we come to calculation of effects, to consideration of that very interesting question—self-consciousness in art.”
“Do you feel that Lady Holme is self-conscious when she is singing?”
“No. And that is just the point. She must, I suppose, have studied till she has reached that last stage of accomplishment in which the self-consciousness present is so perfectly concealed that it seems to be eliminated.”