t taste. Her imagination had already
bounded beyond the first phase unexpectedly great as this had been: her
position struck her as modest compared with the probably future now
vivid to her. Peter had never seen her so soft and sympathetic; she had
insisted in Paris that her personal character was that of the good
girl--she used the term in a fine loose way--and it was impossible to be
a better girl than she showed herself this pleasant afternoon. She was
full of gossip and anecdote and drollery; she had exactly the air he
would have wished her to have--that of thinking of no end of things to
tell him. It was as if she had just returned from a long journey and had
had strange adventures and made wonderful discoveries. She began to
speak of this and that, then broke off to speak of something else; she
talked of the theatre, of the "critics," and above all of London, of the
people she had met and the extraordinary things they said to her, of the
parts she was going to take up, of lots of new ideas that had come to
her about the art of comedy. She wanted to do comedy now--to do the
comedy of London life. She was delighted to find that seeing more of the
world suggested things to her; they came straight from the fact, from
nature, if you could call it nature; she was thus convinced more than
ever that the artist ought to _live_ so as to get on with his business,
gathering ideas and lights from experience--ought to welcome any
experience that would give him lights. But work of course _was_
experience, and everything in one's life that was good was work. That
was the jolly thing in the actor's trade--it made up for other elements
that were odious: if you only kept your eyes open nothing could happen
to you that wouldn't be food for observation and grist to your mill,
showing you how people looked and moved and spoke, cried and grimaced,
writhed and dissimulated, in given situations. She saw all round her
things she wanted to "do"--London bristled with them if you had eyes to
see. She was fierce to know why people didn't take them up, put them
into plays and parts, give one a chance with them; she expressed her
sharp impatience of the general literary _betise_. She had never been
chary of this particular displeasure, and there were moments--it was an
old story and a subject of frank raillery to Sherringham--when to hear
her you might have thought there was no cleverness anywhere but in her
own splendid impatience. She wanted tre