"But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and wait," said Allan Wayworth. "Do you see me hawking it about London?""Indeed I don't--it would be sickening."
"It's what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it's produced.""I shall be old very soon if it isn't!" Mrs. Alsager cried. "I know one or two of them," she mused.
"Do you mean you would speak to them?"
"The thing is to get them to read it. I could do that.""That's the utmost I ask. But it's even for that I shall have to wait."She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. "You sha'n't wait.""Ah, you dear lady!" Wayworth murmured.
"That is YOU may, but _I_ won't! Will you leave me your copy?" she went on, turning the pages again.
"Certainly; I have another." Standing near him she read to herself a passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them out. "Oh, if YOU were only an actress!" the young man exclaimed.
"That's the last thing I am. There's no comedy in ME!"She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius. "Is there any tragedy?" he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.
She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh and a "Perhaps that will be for you to determine!" But before he could disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was talking about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their sympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had taken a tremendous fancy to her. "I can't TELL you how I like that woman!" she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only be balm to the artistic spirit.
"I'm awfully glad she lives a bit. What I feel about her is that she's a good deal like YOU," Wayworth observed.
Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red. This was evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn't, however, treat it as a joke. "I'm not impressed with the resemblance. Idon't see myself doing what she does."
"It isn't so much what she DOES," the young man argued, drawing out his moustache.
"But what she does is the whole point. She simply tells her love--Ishould never do that."
"If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like her for it?""It isn't what I like her for."
"What else, then? That's intensely characteristic."Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from. But the one she produced was unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair at not finding others. "I like her because YOU made her!" she exclaimed with a laugh, moving again away from her companion.
Wayworth laughed still louder. "You made her a little yourself.
I've thought of her as looking like you.""She ought to look much better," said Mrs. Alsager. "No, certainly, I shouldn't do what SHE does.""Not even in the same circumstances?"
"I should never find myself in such circumstances. They're exactly your play, and have nothing in common with such a life as mine.
However," Mrs. Alsager went on, "her behaviour was natural for HER, and not only natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and noble. I can't sufficiently admire the talent and tact with which you make one accept it, and I tell you frankly that it's evident to me there must be a brilliant future before a young man who, at the start, has been capable of such a stroke as that. Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent as intensely as I feel that I don't resemble her!""Don't exaggerate that," said Allan Wayworth.
"My admiration?"
"Your dissimilarity. She has your face, your air, your voice, your motion; she has many elements of your being.""Then she'll damn your play!" Mrs. Alsager replied. They joked a little over this, though it was not in the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth's hostess soon remarked: "You've got your remedy, however:
have her done by the right woman."
"Oh, have her 'done'--have her 'done'!" the young man gently wailed.
"I see what you mean, my poor friend. What a pity, when it's such a magnificent part--such a chance for a clever serious girl! Nona Vincent is practically your play--it will be open to her to carry it far or to drop it at the first corner.""It's a charming prospect," said Allan Wayworth, with sudden scepticism. They looked at each other with eyes that, for a lurid moment, saw the worst of the worst; but before they parted they had exchanged vows and confidences that were dedicated wholly to the ideal. It is not to be supposed, however, that the knowledge that Mrs. Alsager would help him made Wayworth less eager to help himself.
He did what he could and felt that she, on her side, was doing no less; but at the end of a year he was obliged to recognise that their united effort had mainly produced the fine flower of discouragement.
