"That's all right," he said. "It's nothing much, Mrs. Manning, only about my work."
"Well, we won't interrupt you now," she said politely. "Come in when you can."
At the end of a long morning's work, Paul picked up the note as if he had not seen it before, and re-read it. "I'm off to town," she had written. "I've had a sudden notion. Give my love to the Beggar-Man. You and he have got your work to do together just now, and I should only interrupt, but call me in at the finish and I want a box the first night. URSULA." Having read it, Paul smiled again. He was still preoccupied with the beauty of the budding limes that arched the avenue of Sight.
CHAPTER XI
URSULA
If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man. It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard the babble and chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before us by what light we have. They may be right; but so, before heaven, are we. They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or fall. There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how am I to look for loyalty to others? ...
Although all the world ranged themselves in one line to tell "This is wrong," be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador of God—throw down the glove and answer "This is right." Do you think you are only declaring yourself? Perhaps in some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn. It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect oneself and utter the voice of God.—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
You see deeper? Thus saw he,
And by the light he saw, must walk: how else
Was he to do his part?
ROBERT BROWNING: Saviour of Society.
(1)
The day had come at last, and had all but ended. The busy writing, that had been but an interlude, as it seemed afterwards, to the work of curtailing, altering, lengthening and finally staging the play; the alternating moods of despair and hope; the weeks of rehearsals; the immediate days before the performance, spent in town, half lived at the theatre, spent in a new bewildering atmosphere of critical interested faces, critical indifferent faces, toadying sycophant faces, stupid careless faces; all these were over. Arnold and Ursula had stood by him all the time, Arnold giving him sanctuary in his rooms, Ursula ready for his moods, the clearing-house of his thoughts and emotions. Paul had grown ever more clearly aware what good friends these were, and now, for the first night, they two and Tressor had been with him in the box.