eassure them. But they evidently did not believe me.
They knew nothing about anything or anybody. That would have been
rather charming, only they thought they knew everything."

"I think you must have been unfortunate in your experience."

"Perhaps I was. I know I tried to be manly. I talked about Wilson
Barrett. What more could I do? To talk about Wilson Barrett is generally
supposed to show your appreciation of the heroic age. Of course nobody
thinks about him now. But I was quite a failure. I went to five
dinner-parties, I remember, during that week, and we all conversed about
machine-guns at each of them. I felt as if the whole of life was a
machine-gun, and men and women were all quick-firing parties."

"I suppose we are most of us a little inclined to talk shop, as it is
called."

"But we ought to talk general shop, the shop in which everything is sold
from Bibles to cheap cheese. Only we might leave out the Bibles. Mrs.
Humphrey Ward has created a corner in them."

"You have finished the strawberries after all."

Reggie burst into an almost boyish laugh.

"So I have. We none of us live up to our ideals, I suppose. But really I
have none. I agree with Esme that nothing is so limited as to have an
ideal."

"And yet you look sometimes as if you might have many," she said, as if
half to herself. The curious motherly feeling had come upon her again, a
kind of tenderness that often leads to preaching.

Reggie glanced up at her quickly, and with a pleased expression. A
veiled tribute to his good looks delighted him, whether it came from man
or woman. Only an unveiled one surpassed it in his estimation.

"Ah! but that means nothing," he said. "It is quite a mistake to
believe, as many people do, that the mind shows itself in the face. Vice
may sometimes write itself in lines and changes of contour, but that is
all. Our faces are really masks given to us to conceal our minds with.
Of course occasionally the mask slips partly off, generally when we are
stupid and emotional. But that is an inartistic accident. Outward
revelations of what is going on inside of us take place far more seldom
than silly people suppose. No more preposterous theory has ever been put
forward than that of the artist revealing himself in his art. The
writer, for instance, has at least three minds--his Society mind, his
writing mind, and his real mind. They are all quite separate and
distinct, or they ought to be. When his writing mind and