It would be worth fighting, for a man who had it in him, with youth and talent on his side."These words rang not a little in Paul Overt's consciousness - they held him briefly silent. "It's a wonder she has remained as she is; giving herself away so - with so much to give away.""Remaining, you mean, so ingenuous - so natural? Oh she doesn't care a straw - she gives away because she overflows. She has her own feelings, her own standards; she doesn't keep remembering that she must be proud. And then she hasn't been here long enough to be spoiled; she has picked up a fashion or two, but only the amusing ones. She's a provincial - a provincial of genius," St. George went on; "her very blunders are charming, her mistakes are interesting. She has come back from Asia with all sorts of excited curiosities and unappeased appetities. She's first-rate herself and she expends herself on the second-rate. She's life herself and she takes a rare interest in imitations. She mixes all things up, but there are none in regard to which she hasn't perceptions. She sees things in a perspective - as if from the top of the Himalayas - and she enlarges everything she touches. Above all she exaggerates - to herself, I mean. She exaggerates you and me!"There was nothing in that description to allay the agitation caused in our younger friend by such a sketch of a fine subject. It seemed to him to show the art of St. George's admired hand, and he lost himself in gazing at the vision - this hovered there before him - of a woman's figure which should be part of the glory of a novel. But at the end of a moment the thing had turned into smoke, and out of the smoke - the last puff of a big cigar - proceeded the voice of General Fancourt, who had left the others and come and planted himself before the gentlemen on the sofa. "I suppose that when you fellows get talking you sit up half the night.""Half the night? - jamais de la vie! I follow a hygiene" - and St.
George rose to his feet.
"I see - you're hothouse plants," laughed the General. "That's the way you produce your flowers.""I produce mine between ten and one every morning - I bloom with a regularity!" St. George went on.
"And with a splendour!" added the polite General, while Paul noted how little the author of "Shadowmere" minded, as he phrased it to himself, when addressed as a celebrated story-teller. The young man had an idea HE should never get used to that; it would always make him uncomfortable - from the suspicion that people would think they had to - and he would want to prevent it. Evidently his great colleague had toughened and hardened - had made himself a surface.
The group of men had finished their cigars and taken up their bedroom candlesticks; but before they all passed out Lord Watermouth invited the pair of guests who had been so absorbed together to "have" something. It happened that they both declined;upon which General Fancourt said: "Is that the hygiene? You don't water the flowers?""Oh I should drown them!" St. George replied; but, leaving the room still at his young friend's side, he added whimsically, for the latter's benefit, in a lower tone: "My wife doesn't let me.""Well I'm glad I'm not one of you fellows!" the General richly concluded.
The nearness of Summersoft to London had this consequence, chilling to a person who had had a vision of sociability in a railway-carriage, that most of the company, after breakfast, drove back to town, entering their own vehicles, which had come out to fetch them, while their servants returned by train with their luggage.
Three or four young men, among whom was Paul Overt, also availed themselves of the common convenience; but they stood in the portico of the house and saw the others roll away. Miss Fancourt got into a victoria with her father after she had shaken hands with our hero and said, smiling in the frankest way in the world, "I MUST see you more. Mrs. St. George is so nice: she has promised to ask us both to dinner together." This lady and her husband took their places in a perfectly-appointed brougham - she required a closed carriage - and as our young man waved his hat to them in response to their nods and flourishes he reflected that, taken together, they were an honourable image of success, of the material rewards and the social credit of literature. Such things were not the full measure, but he nevertheless felt a little proud for literature.
