"You're in danger of getting to take your art as lightly as you talk about it. Then you'll be lost, for good. It's a real danger. I've seen the thing happen before, to people of as much talent as you, or nearly so."
Harry looked at her in blank astonishment, and she went on:
"If you go on talking that way about your profession, you'll get to think that way and finally be that way. All roses and champagne—nothing worth while. You may go on writing plays, but they'll get sillier and sillier, even if they get more and more popular. So your life will pass away in frivolity and popularity.... That's not your place in the world, Mr. Wimbourne. You've got talent—perhaps more. You know that? This play, now. I say nothing about the dialogue, because good dialogue is not so rare—though yours is the best I've seen for some time—but how about the rest of it, the story, the ideas? It's good stuff—you know it is."
Harry leaned back in his chair and tapped the table meditatively with a spoon. He had the lack of self-consciousness that enables a person to take blame exactly in the spirit in which it is given, with no alloying mixture of embarrassment or resentment.
"Yes," he said after a while, "I suppose you're right about it. I have a certain responsibility.... I suppose the stuff is good, when all is said and done—though I don't dare to think it can be."
Miss Bensel leaned forward with her elbows on the table and allowed her face to relax into a smile, a curious little smile that did not part her lips but drew down the corners of her mouth.
"That's it—I thought that probably was it! You're so modest you're afraid to take yourself seriously. Well, that's a pretty good fault; I think on the whole it's better than taking yourself too seriously. But don't do it, even so. Take it from me, my dear boy, you can't accomplish anything worth while in this world, anything, whatever it is, unless you take your work seriously—at bottom."
Harry did a good deal of serious thinking on the subject during the rest of the day, and the more he thought about it the more convinced he became that Miss Bensel was right. He thought of Dickens' famous utterance on the subject of being flippant about one's life's work; he thought of the example of Congreve. Congreve, there was an appropriate warning! Congreve, whose life was a duel between the painstaking artist and the polished man-about-town, who never would speak other than lightly of his best work, whose boast and whose shame it was deliberately to stifle the fires of his own genius. Was he, Harry, guilty of something like the pose of Congreve? He thought of his attitude of exaggerated camaraderie with the actors and managers, of his attitude toward his own work; he realized that frivolity had become not merely a pose, but a habit. Was he not, in such doings, following in the steps of Congreve—the man who insisted that the work that made him famous had been written for the sole purpose of whiling away the tedium of convalescence after an illness?
As he watched his own play being enacted before his eyes that afternoon he realized that his work was, in the main, good, and that he had known it all along. He had felt it while he was writing it; Bachmann's astonishingly prompt (as he had since learned it to be) acceptance of it had given conclusive proof of it. If anything further was needed, he had it in the enthusiasm with which the actors played it and spoke of it. Somehow, by some incredible chance, the divine gift had fallen upon him. To belittle that gift, to fail to devote his best efforts to making the most of it, would be to shirk his life's duty.
The third act, upon which most of the work of the afternoon was done, drew to its close. It had been immensely shortened by cuts; Harry was not sorry, though he missed some of what he had thought the best lines in the play. Then the heroine made her final exit, and Harry suddenly realized she had done so without her and the hero's having delivered two little speeches that ought to have come just before; speeches on which he had spent much care and labor. Those two lines had, in fact, contained the whole gist of the play, or at any rate driven home its thesis in a particularly striking way. The point of the play was that living was simply a system of chances, and these speeches made clear the distinction between the wrong kind of chancing, the careless, risking-all kind, whose final result was always ruin, and the sober, intelligent, prayerful kind, as shown in the lives of those who, after careful consideration of all the chances that may affect them, do what they decide is best and await the result with the calmness of a Mohammedan fatalist.