vined it, and caught her breath as
if she watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.

"You are magnificently sure," she said. Alicia herself felt curiously
buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate
achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had
become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together,
and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In Hilda's there was an
instant of consideration before she said:

"I might as well tell you--you won't misunderstand--that I am sure. I
expect things of myself. I hold a kind of mortgage on my success; when I
foreclose it will come, bringing the long, steady, grasping chase of
money and fame, eyes fixed, never a day to live in, only to accomplish,
every moment straddled with calculation, an end to all the byeways where
one finds the colour of the sun. The successful London actress, my
dear--what excursion has she? A straight flight across the Atlantic in a
record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many
in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper--an existence of
pure artificiality infested by reporters. It's like living in the shell
of your personality. It's the house forever on your back; at the last
you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on
the floral offerings. There never was reward so qualified by its
conditions."

"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"

"Oh, yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But
then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but
the eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could
begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much
understood in the proscenium--but there are so many, honestly, that
London being at the top of the hill, I'm not panting up. My way of going
has twice wound round the world already. But I'm talking like an
illustrated interview. You will grant the impertinence of all I've been
saying when I tell you that I've never yet had an illustrated
interview."

"Aren't they almost always vulgar?" Alicia asked. "Don't they make you
sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?"

Hilda threw her head back and laughed almost, Alicia noted, like a man.
She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief,
as woman often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much
as she wanted to,