rsonage naturally had passionate Tory sympathies. Now
and again--but not often, for the theatrical profession is generally
Conservative--he came across a furious Radical in the company and
tasted the joy of fierce argument. Now and again too, he came across a
young woman of high modern cultivation, and once or twice narrowly
escaped wrecking his heart on the Scylline rock of her intellect. It
was only when he discovered that she had lost her head over his
romantic looks, and not over his genius and his inherited right to
leadership, that he began to question her intellectual sincerity. And
there is nothing to send love scuttling away with his quiver between
his legs like a note of interrogation of that sort. The only touch of
the morbid in Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere
personal appearance. He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows
on his "fatal beauty." He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase
which every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably
evoke, and he hated it beyond reason. There was a tour during which he
longed for small-pox or a broken nose or facial paralysis, so that no
woman should ever look at him again and no man accuse him in vulgar
jest.

He played small utility parts and understudied the leading man. On the
rare occasions when he played the lead, he made no great hit. The
company did not, after the generous way of theatre folks, surround him,
when the performance was over, with a chorus of congratulation. The
manager would say, "Quite all' right, my boy, as far as it goes, but
still wooden. You must get more life into it." And Paul, who knew
himself to be a better man in every way than the actor whose part he
was playing, just as in his childhood days he knew himself to be a
better man than Billy Goodge, could not understand the general lack of
appreciation. Then he remembered the early struggles of the great
actors: Edmund Kean, who on the eve of his first appearance at Drury
Lane cried, "If I succeed I shall go mad!"; of Henry Irving (then at
his zenith) and the five hundred parts he had played before he came to
London; he recalled also the failure of Disraeli's first speech in the
House of Commons and his triumphant prophecy. He had dreams of that
manager on his bended knees, imploring him, with prayerful hands and
streaming eyes, to play Hamlet at a salary of a thousand a week and of
himself haughtily snapping his fingers at the paltry fellow.