'Talk about him, Zoe, as long as you please.'
'If he had been an ordinary man,' she went on, 'I should have been equally grateful, I suppose. But there it would have ended. To be under a debt of gratitude to such a man as Alec makes one long to do something in return. And, besides, there are so very, very few good men in the world that it does one good only to talk about them.'
'I suppose that Mr. Feilding is really a man of great genius,' said Armorel. 'I confess he seems to me rather ponderous in his talk—may I say, dull? From genius one expects the unexpected.'
'Dull? Oh, no! A little constrained in his manner. That comes from his excessive sensibility. But dull?—oh, no!'
'He seemed dull at the theatre last night.'
'It was a curious coincidence meeting him there, was it not?'
'I thought you must have told him that you were going.'
'No, no; quite a coincidence. And he so seldom goes to a theatre. The badness of the acting, he says, irritates his nerves to such a degree that it sometimes spoils his work for a week. And yet he is actually going to bring out a play himself. There is a paragraph in the paper about it—his own paper. Give it to me, dear; it is on the sofa. Thank you.' She read the paragraph, which we already know. 'What do you think of that, Armorel?'
'Isn't it rather arrogant—about good men turning out good work?'
'My dear, genius can afford to be arrogant. True genius is always impatient of small people and of stupidities. It suffers its contempt to be seen, and that makes the stupidities cry out about arrogance. Even the most stupid can cry out, you see. But think. He is going to add a new wreath to his brow. He is already known as a poet, a novelist, a painter, an essayist, and now he is to become a dramatist. He really is the cleverest man in the whole world.'