One of the company was in earnest. Miss Elmira Jenks believed in her hostess and friend. The others thought it "fun" to "egg on" Miss De Goncourt to make herself ridiculous.
"And why not take the part of the heroine yourself, dear?—nobody in all your intellectual set recites so well. Why not act in your own Tragedy—how delightful it would be!"
"But you forget," said the Lady Dramatist, pouring out for her friend a fresh cup of tea from a delicious specimen of Nankin blue into an equally artistic cup of Oriental white. "You forget that I am thirty."
On the contrary, their memories were excellent.
"Thirty-five, if she's a day," was the silent verdict; aloud, it ran thus:—"My dear, a woman is no older than she looks. You are twenty-five, and, in the classic dress of the Roman Maiden, you will appear twenty—not a day older."
"You are very kind," she said; "but flattery is pleasant when it encourages one's dearest hopes."
"We do not flatter—we speak as critics, and friends," they replied.
Mr. Elliston Drury, the new Tragedian of the Parthenon Theatre, who had come from the Provinces to astonish London, was the only Actor who had given Miss De Goncourt any real encouragement to persevere in the direction to which her ambition pointed; but he was full of sympathy, and knew what it was himself to fight against prejudice, not to say conspiracy. He had literally hewn his way through the ranks of his opponents to the position he now held at the Parthenon. It was not a very high position, it was true, but he had been seen and heard; and the future was before him.
Similarly, he had argued, in the interests of Dramatic Art, Miss De Goncourt must fight her way. He used the aggressive verb metaphorically, of course, and in its moral sense; but he meant it to imply all that was fearless in the conduct of an earnest woman conscious of her literary and dramatic power—she must fight her way! It had fallen to his lot to read many original Dramas, but among all the unacted works of his time, none were so full of promise as Miss De Goncourt's Before the Dawn. He could wish himself no better fortune than the opportunity of creating the leading rôle at a West End Theatre.