Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/224

216 "Oh, you are a Philistine," said Nick.

"Certainly I am," Miriam returned going toward the door, "if it makes me one to be sorry, awfully sorry and even rather angry, that I haven't before me a period of the same sort of unsociable pegging away that you have. For want of it I shall never really be good. However, if you don't tell people I've said so, they'll never know. Your conditions are far better than mine and far more respectable: you can do as many things as you like, in patient obscurity, while I'm pitchforked into the mêlée, and into the most improbable fame, upon the back of a solitary cheval de bataille, a poor broken-winded screw. I foresee that I shall be condemned for the greater part of the rest of my days (do you see that?) to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, if I should succeed, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps they'd want Juliet for ever, instead of my present part. You see amid what delightful alternatives one moves. What I want most I never shall have had—five quiet years of hard, all-round work, in a perfect company, with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred parts and never being heard of. I may be too particular, but that's what I should have liked. I think I'm disgusting, with my successful crudities. It's discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use, in such an age, of being good?"

"Good? Your haughty claim is that you're bad."

"I mean good, you know—there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And Nick's visitor tapped him—he was at the door with her—with her parasol.