n immediate and violent expression. Those
things could be put upon the playhouse boards with comparatively little
sacrifice of their completeness and their truth. To-day we're so
infinitely more reflective and complicated and diffuse that it makes all
the difference. What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a
feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains? You can give a gross,
rough sketch of them, but how little you touch them, how bald you leave
them! What crudity compared with what the novelist does!"

"Do you write novels, Mr. Nash?" Peter candidly asked.

"No, but I read them when they're extraordinarily good, and I don't go
to plays. I read Balzac for instance--I encounter the admirable portrait
of Valerie Marneffe in _La Cousine Bette_."

"And you contrast it with the poverty of Emile Augier's Seraphine in
_Les Lionnes Pauvres_? I was awaiting you there. That's the _cheval de
bataille_ of you fellows."

"What an extraordinary discussion! What dreadful authors!" Lady Agnes
murmured to her son. But he was listening so attentively to the other
young men that he made no response, and Peter Sherringham went on:

"I've seen Madame Carre in things of the modern repertory, which she has
made as vivid to me, caused to abide as ineffaceably in my memory, as
Valerie Marneffe. She's the Balzac, as one may say, of actresses."

"The miniaturist, as it were, of whitewashers!" Nash offered as a
substitute.

It might have been guessed that Sherringham resented his damned freedom,
yet could but emulate his easy form. "You'd be magnanimous if you
thought the young lady you've introduced to our old friend would be
important."

Mr. Nash lightly weighed it. "She might be much more so than she ever
will be."

Lady Agnes, however, got up to terminate the scene and even to signify
that enough had been said about people and questions she had never so
much as heard of. Every one else rose, the waiter brought Nicholas the
receipt of the bill, and Sherringham went on, to his interlocutor:
"Perhaps she'll be more so than you think."

"Perhaps--if you take an interest in her!"

"A mystic voice seems to exhort me to do so, to whisper that though I've
never seen her I shall find something in her." On which Peter appealed.
"What do you say, Biddy--shall I take an interest in her?"

The girl faltered, coloured a little, felt a certain embarrassment in
being publicly treated as an oracle. "If she's not nice I don't advis