“Ghosts?” he echoed.
“Or perhaps you didn’t go?” she suggested, and he perceived that she meant Ibsen’s tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a shock, and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St. Johnswort, with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew a long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss Hernshaw. “Ah, I see you did! Wasn’t it tremendous? I think the girl who did Regina was simply awful, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” said Hewson, still so trammeled in his own involuntary associations with the word as not fully to realize the strangeness of discussing “Ghosts” with a young lady. But he pulled himself together, and nimbly making his reflection that the latitude of the stage gave room for the meeting of cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise tabooed, if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. “I think that the greatest miracle of the play--and to me it was altogether miraculous"--
“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that!” cried the girl. “It was the greatest experience of my life. I can’t bear to have people undervalue it. I want to hit them. But go on!”
Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of her potential violence: he pictured Miss Hernshaw beating down the inadequate witnesses of “Ghosts” with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her cobwebby handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long limp gloves looking curiously like her pretty young arms in their slenderness. “I was merely going to say that the most prodigious effect of the play was among the actors--I won’t venture on the spectators--”
“No, don’t! It isn’t speakable.”
“It’s astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen’s has with the actors. They can’t play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with themselves. They have to be, and not just _seem_.”
Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. “I’m glad you think that,” she said, and Hewson felt very glad too that he thought that.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why? Because that is what I always want to do; and it’s what I always shall do, I don’t care what they say.”