"Not in the least, for from the moment one does anything one ceases to
compete with him. It leaves him the field more clear. But that's just
the discomfort for him--he feels, as you said just now, kind of lonely:
he feels rather abandoned and even, I think, a little betrayed. So far
from being jealous he yearns for me and regrets me. The only thing he
really takes seriously is to speculate and understand, to talk about the
reasons and the essence of things: the people who do that are the
highest. The applications, the consequences, the vulgar little effects,
belong to a lower plane, for which one must doubtless be tolerant and
indulgent, but which is after all an affair of comparative accidents and
trifles. Indeed he'll probably tell me frankly the next time I see him
that he can't but feel that to come down to small questions of
action--to the small prudences and compromises and simplifications of
practice--is for the superior person really a fatal descent. One may be
inoffensive and even commendable after it, but one can scarcely pretend
to be interesting. '_Il en faut comme ca_,' but one doesn't haunt them.
He'll do his best for me; he'll come back again, but he'll come back
sad, and finally he'll fade away altogether. Hell go off to Granada or
somewhere."
"The simplifications of practice?" cried Miriam. "Why they're just
precisely the most blessed things on earth. What should we do without
them?"
"What indeed?" Nick echoed. "But if we need them it's because we're not
superior persons. We're awful Philistines."
"I'll be one with _you_," the girl smiled. "Poor Nash isn't worth
talking about. What was it but a small question of action when he
preached to you, as I know he did, to give up your seat?"
"Yes, he has a weakness for giving up--he'll go with you as far as that.
But I'm not giving up any more, you see. I'm pegging away, and that's
gross."
"He's an idiot--_n'en parlons plus_!" she dropped, gathering up her
parasol but lingering.
"Ah I stick to him," Nick said. "He helped me at a difficult time."
"You ought to be ashamed to confess it."
"Oh you _are_ a Philistine!" Nick returned.
"Certainly I am," she declared, going toward the door--"if it makes me
one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't
before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you
have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't
tell people I've said so they'll never know. Your conditions are far
better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as
you like in patient obscurity while I'm pitchforked into the _melee_ and
into the most improbable fame--all on the back of a solitary _cheval de
bataille_, a poor broken-winded screw. I read it clear that I shall be
condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days--do you see
that?--to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want
awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, making a success
of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would
want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what
delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall
have had--five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company,
with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never
being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that's what I should
have liked. I think I'm disgusting with my successful crudities. It's
discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use,
in such an age, of being good?"
"Good? Your haughty claim," Nick laughed, "is that you're bad."
"I mean _good_, you know--there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And
Miriam tapped him--he was near her at the door--with her parasol.
"I scarcely know what to say to you," he logically pleaded, "for
certainly it's your fault if you get on so fast."
"I'm too clever--I'm a humbug."
"That's the way I used to be," said Nick.
She rested her brave eyes on him, then turned them over the room slowly;
after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly--rather as if he
had been a fine view or an interesting object--to his face. "Ah, the
pride of that--the sense of purification! He 'used' to be forsooth! Poor
me! Of course you'll say, 'Look at the sort of thing I've undertaken to
produce compared with the rot you have.' So it's all right. Become great
in the proper way and don't expose me." She glanced back once more at
the studio as if to leave it for ever, and gave another last look at the
unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly, "Poor Mr.
Sherringham--with _that_!" she wailed.
"Oh I'll finish it--it will be very decent," Nick said.
"Finish it by yourself?"
"Not necessarily. You'll come back and sit when you return to London."
"Never, never, never again."