Page:Hichens - The Green Carnation.djvu/66

58 "Poor Teddy! Have his conversational powers gone off? I never see him. The world is so very large, isn't it?"

"No, he still talks rather well." Then she added, turning to Lady Locke, "You know I always give him five shillings an hour, in generous moments ten, to take me about and talk to me. He is a superb raconteur. I shall miss him very much."

"The profession of a conversationalist is so delightful," said Mrs. Windsor, "I wonder more people don't follow it. You are too generous, Esmé; you took it up out of pure love of the thing."

"The true artist will always be an amateur," said Lord Reggie, dreamily, and gazing towards Lady Locke with abstracted blue eyes, "just as the true martyr will always live for his faith. Esmé is like the thrush. He always tells us his epigrams twice over, lest we should fail to capture their first fine careful rapture. Repetition is one of the secrets of success nowadays. Esmé was the first conversationalist in England to discover that fact, and so he won his present unrivalled position, and has known how to keep it."

"Conversational powers are sometimes very distressing," said Madame Valtesi. "Last winter I was having my house in Cromwell