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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nona Vincent, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Nona Vincent
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2015  [eBook #2717]
+[This file was first posted on July 3, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONA VINCENT***
+
+
+Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine
+Smith and David.
+
+
+
+
+
+                              NONA VINCENT.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+“I WONDERED whether you wouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as
+they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave.  She looked
+down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her
+proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm.  Her charm was
+always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of her house, which
+was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling
+that he always made several false starts before departure.  He had spent
+some such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, golden
+drawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of the worries of his
+life, that it had come to be the immediate answer to his longings, the
+cure for his aches, the harbour of refuge from his storms.  His
+tribulations were not unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a
+usual kind, were marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one
+so young, and very independent for one so poor.  He was eight-and-twenty,
+but he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities
+and disappointments.  The opportunity to talk of some of these in
+Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of
+London.  This inconvenience took for him principally the line of
+insensibility to Allan Wayworth’s literary form.  He had a literary form,
+or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the circumstance
+was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have administered.  She
+was even more literary and more artistic than he, inasmuch as he could
+often work off his overflow (this was his occupation, his profession),
+while the generous woman, abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and
+unpublished, stood there in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain
+in the plash of the marble basin.
+
+The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next her
+at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour into a
+feast of reason.  There was no motive for her asking him to come to see
+her but that she liked him, which it was the more agreeable to him to
+perceive as he perceived at the same time that she was exquisite.  She
+was enviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feel less
+unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to be one of them.
+He kept the revelation to himself, and indeed there was nothing to turn
+his head in the kindness of a kind woman.  Mrs. Alsager occupied so
+completely the ground of possession that she would have been condemned to
+inaction had it not been for the principle of giving.  Her husband, who
+was twenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and a
+heavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he was monumental),
+owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a great many other things.
+He admired his wife, though she bore no children, and liked her to have
+other tastes than his, as that seemed to give a greater acreage to their
+life.  His own appetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary,
+and his theory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so that
+between them the pair should astound by their consumption.  His ideas
+were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the good fortune to be
+carried out by a person of perfect delicacy.  Her delicacy made her play
+strange tricks with them, but he never found this out.  She attenuated
+him without his knowing it, for what he mainly thought was that he had
+aggrandised _her_.  Without her he really would have been bigger still,
+and society, breathing more freely, was practically under an obligation
+to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of
+mystified respect.  She felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and
+her leisure into the things of the soul—the most beautiful things she
+knew.  She found them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred
+places, and particularly in a dim and sacred region—the region of active
+pity—over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it
+would have been an impertinence to lift them.  But she cultivated other
+beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of something fine the
+moments at which it most seemed to her to come true were when she saw
+beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of art.  She loved the perfect
+work—she had the artistic chord.  This chord could vibrate only to the
+touch of another, so that appreciation, in her spirit, had the added
+intensity of regret.  She could understand the joy of creation, and she
+thought it scarcely enough to be told that she herself created happiness.
+She would have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just
+here that her liberty failed her.  She had not the voice—she had only the
+vision.  The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as
+she said, could do something.
+
+As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was admirably
+hospitable to such people as a class.  She believed Allan Wayworth could
+do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the ways in which he
+meant to show it.  He talked of them almost to no one else—she spoiled
+him for other listeners.  With her fair bloom and her quiet grace she was
+indeed an ideal public, and if she had ever confided to him that she
+would have liked to scribble (she had in fact not mentioned it to a
+creature), he would have been in a perfect position for asking her why a
+woman whose face had so much expression should not have felt that she
+achieved.  How in the world could she express better?  There was less
+than that in Shakespeare and Beethoven.  She had never been more generous
+than when, in compliance with her invitation, which I have recorded, he
+brought his play to read to her.  He had spoken of it to her before, and
+one dark November afternoon, when her red fireside was more than ever an
+escape from the place and the season, he had broken out as he came
+in—“I’ve done it, I’ve done it!”  She made him tell her all about it—she
+took an interest really minute and asked questions delightfully apt.  She
+had spoken from the first as if he were on the point of being acted,
+making him jump, with her participation, all sorts of dreary intervals.
+She liked the theatre as she liked all the arts of expression, and he had
+known her to go all the way to Paris for a particular performance.  Once
+he had gone with her—the time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn.  She had
+been struck, when he sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had
+spoken words that helped him to believe in it.  As soon as he had rung
+down his curtain on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that
+he kept the thing for repeated last touches.  Finally, on Christmas day,
+by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it.  It was in three acts
+and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with
+contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the hand
+if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.
+
+Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a
+miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent, for
+years, in several foreign countries successively, of a conspicuous London
+journal, had died just after this, leaving his mother and her two other
+children, portionless girls, to subsist on a very small income in a very
+dull German town.  The young man’s beginnings in London were difficult,
+and he had aggravated them by his dislike of journalism.  His father’s
+connection with it would have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of
+his friends judged—the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager)
+_intraitable_ on the question of form.  Form—in his sense—was not
+demanded by English newspapers, and he couldn’t give it to them in
+_their_ sense.  The demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth
+spent costly weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that
+didn’t pay for style.  The only person who paid for it was really Mrs.
+Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for the perfect.  She paid in her
+own way, and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would
+have made him feel that if he didn’t receive his legal dues his palm was
+at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity.  He had his limitations,
+his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the most alive, and he
+was restless and sincere.  It is however the impression he produced on
+Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she thought him not only remarkably
+good-looking but altogether original.  There were some usual bad things
+he would never do—too many prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut
+to success.
+
+For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way, as
+he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which
+struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from
+within.  He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to
+him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low
+in an air thick with vulgarity.  It was hedged about with sordid
+approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering.  The man of
+letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which
+was like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego his immemorial
+heritage.  Aspects change, however, with the point of view: Wayworth had
+waked up one morning in a different bed altogether.  It is needless here
+to trace this accident to its source; it would have been much more
+interesting to a spectator of the young man’s life to follow some of the
+consequences.  He had been made (as he felt) the subject of a special
+revelation, and he wore his hat like a man in love.  An angel had taken
+him by the hand and guided him to the shabby door which opens, it
+appeared, into an interior both splendid and austere.  The scenic idea
+was magnificent when once you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a
+purity which made some others look ingloriously rough.  It had the high
+dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural.  It
+was full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the
+incorruptibility of line and law.  It was bare, but it was erect, it was
+poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed for
+justice who should have lived in a palace despoiled.  There was a fearful
+amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare intensity.  You
+were perpetually throwing over the cargo to save the ship, but what a
+motion you gave her when you made her ride the waves—a motion as rhythmic
+as the dance of a goddess!  Wayworth took long London walks and thought
+of these things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum of its
+suggestion.  His imagination glowed and melted down material, his
+intentions multiplied and made the air a golden haze.  He saw not only
+the thing he should do, but the next and the next and the next; the
+future opened before him and he seemed to walk on marble slabs.  The more
+he tried the dramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it
+the more he perceived in it.  What he perceived in it indeed he now
+perceived everywhere; if he stopped, in the London dusk, before some
+flaring shop-window, the place immediately constituted itself behind
+footlights, became a framed stage for his figures.  He hammered at these
+figures in his lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their
+tabernacle; he was like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with
+the passion for perfection.  When he was neither roaming the streets with
+his vision nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas
+on the general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details
+that would amuse her in later and still happier hours.  Her eyes were
+full of tears when he read her the last words of the finished work, and
+she murmured, divinely—
+
+“And now—to get it done, to get it done!”
+
+“Yes, indeed—to get it done!” Wayworth stared at the fire, slowly rolling
+up his type-copy.  “But that’s a totally different part of the business,
+and altogether secondary.”
+
+“But of course you want to be acted?”
+
+“Of course I do—but it’s a sudden descent.  I want to intensely, but I’m
+sorry I want to.”
+
+“It’s there indeed that the difficulties begin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a
+little off her guard.
+
+“How can you say that?  It’s there that they end!”
+
+“Ah, wait to see where they end!”
+
+“I mean they’ll now be of a totally different order,” Wayworth explained.
+“It seems to me there can be nothing in the world more difficult than to
+write a play that will stand an all-round test, and that in comparison
+with them the complications that spring up at this point are of an
+altogether smaller kind.”
+
+“Yes, they’re not inspiring,” said Mrs. Alsager; “they’re discouraging,
+because they’re vulgar.  The other problem, the working out of the thing
+itself, is pure art.”
+
+“How well you understand everything!”  The young man had got up,
+nervously, and was leaning against the chimney-piece with his back to the
+fire and his arms folded.  The roll of his copy, in his fist, was
+squeezed into the hollow of one of them.  He looked down at Mrs. Alsager,
+smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile from eyes still
+charmed and suffused.  “Yes, the vulgarity will begin now,” he presently
+added.
+
+“You’ll suffer dreadfully.”
+
+“I shall suffer in a good cause.”
+
+“Yes, giving _that_ to the world!  You must leave it with me, I must read
+it over and over,” Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw
+the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic
+identity now to him, out of his grasp.  “Who in the world will do it?—who
+in the world _can_?” she went on, close to him, turning over the leaves.
+Before he could answer she had stopped at one of the pages; she turned
+the book round to him, pointing out a speech.  “That’s the most beautiful
+place—those lines are a perfection.”  He glanced at the spot she
+indicated, and she begged him to read them again—he had read them
+admirably before.  He knew them by heart, and, closing the book while she
+held the other end of it, he murmured them over to her—they had indeed a
+cadence that pleased him—watching, with a facetious complacency which he
+hoped was pardonable, the applause in her face.  “Ah, who can utter such
+lines as _that_?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can you find to do
+_her_?”
+
+“We’ll find people to do them all!”
+
+“But not people who are worthy.”
+
+“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willing enough.  I’ll work with
+them—I’ll grind it into them.”  He spoke as if he had produced twenty
+plays.
+
+“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.
+
+“But I shall have to find my theatre first.  I shall have to get a
+manager to believe in me.”
+
+“Yes—they’re so stupid!”
+
+“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and
+wait,” said Allan Wayworth.  “Do you see me hawking it about London?”
+
+“Indeed I don’t—it would be sickening.”
+
+“It’s what I shall have to do.  I shall be old before it’s produced.”
+
+“I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs. Alsager cried.  “I know one
+or two of them,” she mused.
+
+“Do you mean you would speak to them?”
+
+“The thing is to get them to read it.  I could do that.”
+
+“That’s the utmost I ask.  But it’s even for that I shall have to wait.”
+
+She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes.  “You sha’n’t wait.”
+
+“Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured.
+
+“That is _you_ may, but _I_ won’t!  Will you leave me your copy?” she
+went on, turning the pages again.
+
+“Certainly; I have another.”  Standing near him she read to herself a
+passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them
+out.  “Oh, if _you_ were only an actress!” the young man exclaimed.
+
+“That’s the last thing I am.  There’s no comedy in _me_!”
+
+She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius.  “Is there
+any tragedy?” he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.
+
+She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh and
+a “Perhaps that will be for you to determine!”  But before he could
+disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was talking
+about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their
+friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their
+sympathy.  Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had
+taken a tremendous fancy to her.  “I can’t _tell_ you how I like that
+woman!” she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only
+be balm to the artistic spirit.
+
+“I’m awfully glad she lives a bit.  What I feel about her is that she’s a
+good deal like _you_,” Wayworth observed.
+
+Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red.  This was
+evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn’t, however, treat it
+as a joke.  “I’m not impressed with the resemblance.  I don’t see myself
+doing what she does.”
+
+“It isn’t so much what she _does_,” the young man argued, drawing out his
+moustache.
+
+“But what she does is the whole point.  She simply tells her love—I
+should never do that.”
+
+“If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like her
+for it?”
+
+“It isn’t what I like her for.”
+
+“What else, then?  That’s intensely characteristic.”
+
+Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of
+having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from.  But the one she produced was
+unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair at not
+finding others.  “I like her because _you_ made her!” she exclaimed with
+a laugh, moving again away from her companion.
+
+Wayworth laughed still louder.  “You made her a little yourself.  I’ve
+thought of her as looking like you.”
+
+“She ought to look much better,” said Mrs. Alsager.  “No, certainly, I
+shouldn’t do what _she_ does.”
+
+“Not even in the same circumstances?”
+
+“I should never find myself in such circumstances.  They’re exactly your
+play, and have nothing in common with such a life as mine.  However,”
+Mrs. Alsager went on, “her behaviour was natural for _her_, and not only
+natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and noble.  I can’t
+sufficiently admire the talent and tact with which you make one accept
+it, and I tell you frankly that it’s evident to me there must be a
+brilliant future before a young man who, at the start, has been capable
+of such a stroke as that.  Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent as
+intensely as I feel that I don’t resemble her!”
+
+“Don’t exaggerate that,” said Allan Wayworth.
+
+“My admiration?”
+
+“Your dissimilarity.  She has your face, your air, your voice, your
+motion; she has many elements of your being.”
+
+“Then she’ll damn your play!” Mrs. Alsager replied.  They joked a little
+over this, though it was not in the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth’s
+hostess soon remarked: “You’ve got your remedy, however: have her done by
+the right woman.”
+
+“Oh, have her ‘done’—have her ‘done’!” the young man gently wailed.
+
+“I see what you mean, my poor friend.  What a pity, when it’s such a
+magnificent part—such a chance for a clever serious girl!  Nona Vincent
+is practically your play—it will be open to her to carry it far or to
+drop it at the first corner.”
+
+“It’s a charming prospect,” said Allan Wayworth, with sudden scepticism.
+They looked at each other with eyes that, for a lurid moment, saw the
+worst of the worst; but before they parted they had exchanged vows and
+confidences that were dedicated wholly to the ideal.  It is not to be
+supposed, however, that the knowledge that Mrs. Alsager would help him
+made Wayworth less eager to help himself.  He did what he could and felt
+that she, on her side, was doing no less; but at the end of a year he was
+obliged to recognise that their united effort had mainly produced the
+fine flower of discouragement.  At the end of a year the lustre had, to
+his own eyes, quite faded from his unappreciated masterpiece, and he
+found himself writing for a biographical dictionary little lives of
+celebrities he had never heard of.  To be printed, anywhere and anyhow,
+was a form of glory for a man so unable to be acted, and to be paid, even
+at encyclopædic rates, had the consequence of making one resigned and
+verbose.  He couldn’t smuggle style into a dictionary, but he could at
+least reflect that he had done his best to learn from the drama that it
+is a gross impertinence almost anywhere.  He had knocked at the door of
+every theatre in London, and, at a ruinous expense, had multiplied
+type-copies of _Nona Vincent_ to replace the neat transcripts that had
+descended into the managerial abyss.  His play was not even declined—no
+such flattering intimation was given him that it had been read.  What the
+managers would do for Mrs. Alsager concerned him little today; the thing
+that was relevant was that they would do nothing for _him_.  That
+charming woman felt humbled to the earth, so little response had she had
+from the powers on which she counted.  The two never talked about the
+play now, but he tried to show her a still finer friendship, that she
+might not think he felt she had failed him.  He still walked about London
+with his dreams, but as months succeeded months and he left the year
+behind him they were dreams not so much of success as of revenge.
+Success seemed a colourless name for the reward of his patience;
+something fiercely florid, something sanguinolent was more to the point.
+His best consolation however was still in the scenic idea; it was not
+till now that he discovered how incurably he was in love with it.  By the
+time a vain second year had chafed itself away he cherished his fruitless
+faculty the more for the obloquy it seemed to suffer.  He lived, in his
+best hours, in a world of subjects and situations; he wrote another play
+and made it as different from its predecessor as such a very good thing
+could be.  It might be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to
+the theatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of the
+difference.  He was at last able to leave England for three or four
+months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferred to his mother and
+sisters.
+
+Shortly before the time he had fixed for his return he received from Mrs.
+Alsager a telegram consisting of the words: “Loder wishes see you—putting
+_Nona_ instant rehearsal.”  He spent the few hours before his departure
+in kissing his mother and sisters, who knew enough about Mrs. Alsager to
+judge it lucky this respectable married lady was not there—a relief,
+however, accompanied with speculative glances at London and the morrow.
+Loder, as our young man was aware, meant the new “Renaissance,” but
+though he reached home in the evening it was not to this convenient
+modern theatre that Wayworth first proceeded.  He spent a late hour with
+Mrs. Alsager, an hour that throbbed with calculation.  She told him that
+Mr. Loder was charming, he had simply taken up the play in its turn; he
+had hopes of it, moreover, that on the part of a professional pessimist
+might almost be qualified as ecstatic.  It had been cast, with a margin
+for objections, and Violet Grey was to do the heroine.  She had been
+capable, while he was away, of a good piece of work at that foggy old
+playhouse the “Legitimate;” the piece was a clumsy _réchauffé_, but she
+at least had been fresh.  Wayworth remembered Violet Grey—hadn’t he, for
+two years, on a fond policy of “looking out,” kept dipping into the
+London theatres to pick up prospective interpreters?  He had not picked
+up many as yet, and this young lady at all events had never wriggled in
+his net.  She was pretty and she was odd, but he had never prefigured her
+as Nona Vincent, nor indeed found himself attracted by what he already
+felt sufficiently launched in the profession to speak of as her artistic
+personality.  Mrs. Alsager was different—she declared that she had been
+struck not a little by some of her tones.  The girl was interesting in
+the thing at the “Legitimate,” and Mr. Loder, who had his eye on her,
+described her as ambitious and intelligent.  She wanted awfully to get
+on—and some of those ladies were so lazy!  Wayworth was sceptical—he had
+seen Miss Violet Grey, who was terribly itinerant, in a dozen theatres
+but only in one aspect.  Nona Vincent had a dozen aspects, but only one
+theatre; yet with what a feverish curiosity the young man promised
+himself to watch the actress on the morrow!  Talking the matter over with
+Mrs. Alsager now seemed the very stuff that rehearsal was made of.  The
+near prospect of being acted laid a finger even on the lip of inquiry; he
+wanted to go on tiptoe till the first night, to make no condition but
+that they should speak his lines, and he felt that he wouldn’t so much as
+raise an eyebrow at the scene-painter if he should give him an old oak
+chamber.
+
+He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would be other than
+this, and yet he couldn’t have expressed to himself what it would be.
+Danger was there, doubtless—danger was everywhere, in the world of art,
+and still more in the world of commerce; but what he really seemed to
+catch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings of victory.  Nothing
+could undermine that, since it was victory simply to be acted.  It would
+be victory even to be acted badly; a reflection that didn’t prevent him,
+however, from banishing, in his politic optimism, the word “bad” from his
+vocabulary.  It had no application, in the compromise of practice; it
+didn’t apply even to his play, which he was conscious he had already
+outlived and as to which he foresaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent
+alarm would alternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem.  When he went
+down to the dusky daylit theatre (it arched over him like the temple of
+fame) Mr. Loder, who was as charming as Mrs. Alsager had announced,
+struck him as the genius of hospitality.  The manager began to explain
+why, for so long, he had given no sign; but that was the last thing that
+interested Wayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what
+reasons Mr. Loder had enumerated.  He liked, in the whole business of
+discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought he should
+probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thought he should like.
+He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening with eyes that sought to
+penetrate her possibilities.  She certainly had a few; they were
+qualities of voice and face, qualities perhaps even of intelligence; he
+sat there at any rate with a fostering, coaxing attention, repeating over
+to himself as convincingly as he could that she was not common—a
+circumstance all the more creditable as the part she was playing seemed
+to him desperately so.  He perceived that this was why it pleased the
+audience; he divined that it was the part they enjoyed rather than the
+actress.  He had a private panic, wondering how, if they liked _that_
+form, they could possibly like his.  His form had now become quite an
+ultimate idea to him.  By the time the evening was over some of Miss
+Violet Grey’s features, several of the turns of her head, a certain
+vibration of her voice, had taken their place in the same category.  She
+_was_ interesting, she was distinguished; at any rate he had accepted
+her: it came to the same thing.  But he left the theatre that night
+without speaking to her—moved (a little even to his own mystification) by
+an odd procrastinating impulse.  On the morrow he was to read his three
+acts to the company, and then he should have a good deal to say; what he
+felt for the moment was a vague indisposition to commit himself.
+Moreover he found a slight confusion of annoyance in the fact that though
+he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in Violet
+Grey’s person, what subsisted in his vision was simply Violet Grey in
+Nona’s.  He didn’t wish to see the actress so directly, or even so simply
+as that; and it had been very fatiguing, the effort to focus Nona both
+through the performer and through the “Legitimate.”  Before he went to
+bed that night he posted three words to Mrs. Alsager—“She’s not a bit
+like it, but I dare say I can make her do.”
+
+He was pleased with the way the actress listened, the next day, at the
+reading; he was pleased indeed with many things, at the reading, and most
+of all with the reading itself.  The whole affair loomed large to him and
+he magnified it and mapped it out.  He enjoyed his occupation of the big,
+dim, hollow theatre, full of the echoes of “effect” and of a queer smell
+of gas and success—it all seemed such a passive canvas for his picture.
+For the first time in his life he was in command of resources; he was
+acquainted with the phrase, but had never thought he should know the
+feeling.  He was surprised at what Loder appeared ready to do, though he
+reminded himself that he must never show it.  He foresaw that there would
+be two distinct concomitants to the artistic effort of producing a play,
+one consisting of a great deal of anguish and the other of a great deal
+of amusement.  He looked back upon the reading, afterwards, as the best
+hour in the business, because it was then that the piece had most struck
+him as represented.  What came later was the doing of others; but this,
+with its imperfections and failures, was all his own.  The drama lived,
+at any rate, for that hour, with an intensity that it was promptly to
+lose in the poverty and patchiness of rehearsal; he could see its life
+reflected, in a way that was sweet to him, in the stillness of the little
+semi-circle of attentive and inscrutable, of water-proofed and
+muddy-booted, actors.  Miss Violet Grey was the auditor he had most to
+say to, and he tried on the spot, across the shabby stage, to let her
+have the soul of her part.  Her attitude was graceful, but though she
+appeared to listen with all her faculties her face remained perfectly
+blank; a fact, however, not discouraging to Wayworth, who liked her
+better for not being premature.  Her companions gave discernible signs of
+recognising the passages of comedy; yet Wayworth forgave her even then
+for being inexpressive.  She evidently wished before everything else to
+be simply sure of what it was all about.
+
+He was more surprised even than at the revelation of the scale on which
+Mr. Loder was ready to proceed by the discovery that some of the actors
+didn’t like their parts, and his heart sank as he asked himself what he
+could possibly do with them if they were going to be so stupid.  This was
+the first of his disappointments; somehow he had expected every
+individual to become instantly and gratefully conscious of a rare
+opportunity, and from the moment such a calculation failed he was at sea,
+or mindful at any rate that more disappointments would come.  It was
+impossible to make out what the manager liked or disliked; no judgment,
+no comment escaped him; his acceptance of the play and his views about
+the way it should be mounted had apparently converted him into a veiled
+and shrouded figure.  Wayworth was able to grasp the idea that they would
+all move now in a higher and sharper air than that of compliment and
+confidence.  When he talked with Violet Grey after the reading he
+gathered that she was really rather crude: what better proof of it could
+there be than her failure to break out instantly with an expression of
+delight about her great chance?  This reserve, however, had evidently
+nothing to do with high pretensions; she had no wish to make him feel
+that a person of her eminence was superior to easy raptures.  He guessed,
+after a little, that she was puzzled and even somewhat frightened—to a
+certain extent she had not understood.  Nothing could appeal to him more
+than the opportunity to clear up her difficulties, in the course of the
+examination of which he quickly discovered that, so far as she _had_
+understood, she had understood wrong.  If she was crude it was only a
+reason the more for talking to her; he kept saying to her “Ask me—ask me:
+ask me everything you can think of.”
+
+She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at the first
+rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degree that made them
+strike him much more as the death of an experiment than as the dawn of a
+success, they threshed things out immensely in a corner of the stage,
+with the effect of his coming to feel that at any rate she was in
+earnest.  He felt more and more that his heroine was the keystone of his
+arch, for which indeed the actress was very ready to take her.  But when
+he reminded this young lady of the way the whole thing practically
+depended on her she was alarmed and even slightly scandalised: she spoke
+more than once as if that could scarcely be the right way to construct a
+play—make it stand or fall by one poor nervous girl.  She was almost
+morbidly conscientious, and in theory he liked her for this, though he
+lost patience three or four times with the things she couldn’t do and the
+things she could.  At such times the tears came to her eyes; but they
+were produced by her own stupidity, she hastened to assure him, not by
+the way he spoke, which was awfully kind under the circumstances.  Her
+sincerity made her beautiful, and he wished to heaven (and made a point
+of telling her so) that she could sprinkle a little of it over Nona.
+Once, however, she was so touched and troubled that the sight of it
+brought the tears for an instant to his own eyes; and it so happened
+that, turning at this moment, he found himself face to face with Mr.
+Loder.  The manager stared, glanced at the actress, who turned in the
+other direction, and then smiling at Wayworth, exclaimed, with the humour
+of a man who heard the gallery laugh every night:
+
+“I say—I say!”
+
+“What’s the matter?” Wayworth asked.
+
+“I’m glad to see Miss Grey is taking such pains with you.”
+
+“Oh, yes—she’ll turn me out!” said the young man, gaily.  He was quite
+aware that it was apparent he was not superficial about Nona, and
+abundantly determined, into the bargain, that the rehearsal of the piece
+should not sacrifice a shade of thoroughness to any extrinsic
+consideration.
+
+Mrs. Alsager, whom, late in the afternoon, he used often to go and ask
+for a cup of tea, thanking her in advance for the rest she gave him and
+telling her how he found that rehearsal (as _they_ were doing it—it was a
+caution!) took it out of one—Mrs. Alsager, more and more his good genius
+and, as he repeatedly assured her, his ministering angel, confirmed him
+in this superior policy and urged him on to every form of artistic
+devotion.  She had, naturally, never been more interested than now in his
+work; she wanted to hear everything about everything.  She treated him as
+heroically fatigued, plied him with luxurious restoratives, made him
+stretch himself on cushions and rose-leaves.  They gossipped more than
+ever, by her fire, about the artistic life; he confided to her, for
+instance, all his hopes and fears, all his experiments and anxieties, on
+the subject of the representative of Nona.  She was immensely interested
+in this young lady and showed it by taking a box again and again (she had
+seen her half-a-dozen times already), to study her capacity through the
+veil of her present part.  Like Allan Wayworth she found her encouraging
+only by fits, for she had fine flashes of badness.  She was intelligent,
+but she cried aloud for training, and the training was so absent that the
+intelligence had only a fraction of its effect.  She was like a knife
+without an edge—good steel that had never been sharpened; she hacked away
+at her hard dramatic loaf, she couldn’t cut it smooth.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+“CERTAINLY my leading lady won’t make Nona much like _you_!” Wayworth one
+day gloomily remarked to Mrs. Alsager.  There were days when the prospect
+seemed to him awful.
+
+“So much the better.  There’s no necessity for that.”
+
+“I wish you’d train her a little—you could so easily,” the young man went
+on; in response to which Mrs. Alsager requested him not to make such
+cruel fun of her.  But she was curious about the girl, wanted to hear of
+her character, her private situation, how she lived and where, seemed
+indeed desirous to befriend her.  Wayworth might not have known much
+about the private situation of Miss Violet Grey, but, as it happened, he
+was able, by the time his play had been three weeks in rehearsal, to
+supply information on such points.  She was a charming, exemplary person,
+educated, cultivated, with highly modern tastes, an excellent musician.
+She had lost her parents and was very much alone in the world, her only
+two relations being a sister, who was married to a civil servant (in a
+highly responsible post) in India, and a dear little old-fashioned aunt
+(really a great-aunt) with whom she lived at Notting Hill, who wrote
+children’s books and who, it appeared, had once written a Christmas
+pantomime.  It was quite an artistic home—not on the scale of Mrs.
+Alsager’s (to compare the smallest things with the greatest!) but
+intensely refined and honourable.  Wayworth went so far as to hint that
+it would be rather nice and human on Mrs. Alsager’s part to go there—they
+would take it so kindly if she should call on them.  She had acted so
+often on his hints that he had formed a pleasant habit of expecting it:
+it made him feel so wisely responsible about giving them.  But this one
+appeared to fall to the ground, so that he let the subject drop.  Mrs.
+Alsager, however, went yet once more to the “Legitimate,” as he found by
+her saying to him abruptly, on the morrow: “Oh, she’ll be very
+good—she’ll be very good.”  When they said “she,” in these days, they
+always meant Violet Grey, though they pretended, for the most part, that
+they meant Nona Vincent.
+
+“Oh yes,” Wayworth assented, “she wants so to!”
+
+Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment; then she asked, a little
+inconsequently, as if she had come back from a reverie: “Does she want to
+_very_ much?”
+
+“Tremendously—and it appears she has been fascinated by the part from the
+first.”
+
+“Why then didn’t she say so?”
+
+“Oh, because she’s so funny.”
+
+“She _is_ funny,” said Mrs. Alsager, musingly; and presently she added:
+“She’s in love with you.”
+
+Wayworth stared, blushed very red, then laughed out.  “What is there
+funny in that?” he demanded; but before his interlocutress could satisfy
+him on this point he inquired, further, how she knew anything about it.
+After a little graceful evasion she explained that the night before, at
+the “Legitimate,” Mrs. Beaumont, the wife of the actor-manager, had paid
+her a visit in her box; which had happened, in the course of their brief
+gossip, to lead to her remarking that she had never been “behind.”  Mrs.
+Beaumont offered on the spot to take her round, and the fancy had seized
+her to accept the invitation.  She had been amused for the moment, and in
+this way it befell that her conductress, at her request, had introduced
+her to Miss Violet Grey, who was waiting in the wing for one of her
+scenes.  Mrs. Beaumont had been called away for three minutes, and during
+this scrap of time, face to face with the actress, she had discovered the
+poor girl’s secret.  Wayworth qualified it as a senseless thing, but
+wished to know what had led to the discovery.  She characterised this
+inquiry as superficial for a painter of the ways of women; and he
+doubtless didn’t improve it by remarking profanely that a cat might look
+at a king and that such things were convenient to know.  Even on this
+ground, however, he was threatened by Mrs. Alsager, who contended that it
+might not be a joking matter to the poor girl.  To this Wayworth, who now
+professed to hate talking about the passions he might have inspired,
+could only reply that he meant it couldn’t make a difference to Mrs.
+Alsager.
+
+“How in the world do you know what makes a difference to _me_?” this lady
+asked, with incongruous coldness, with a haughtiness indeed remarkable in
+so gentle a spirit.
+
+He saw Violet Grey that night at the theatre, and it was she who spoke
+first of her having lately met a friend of his.
+
+“She’s in love with you,” the actress said, after he had made a show of
+ignorance; “doesn’t that tell you anything?”
+
+He blushed redder still than Mrs. Alsager had made him blush, but
+replied, quickly enough and very adequately, that hundreds of women were
+naturally dying for him.
+
+“Oh, I don’t care, for you’re not in love with _her_!” the girl
+continued.
+
+“Did she tell you that too?” Wayworth asked; but she had at that moment
+to go on.
+
+Standing where he could see her he thought that on this occasion she
+threw into her scene, which was the best she had in the play, a brighter
+art than ever before, a talent that could play with its problem.  She was
+perpetually doing things out of rehearsal (she did two or three to-night,
+in the other man’s piece), that he as often wished to heaven Nona Vincent
+might have the benefit of.  She appeared to be able to do them for every
+one but him—that is for every one but Nona.  He was conscious, in these
+days, of an odd new feeling, which mixed (this was a part of its oddity)
+with a very natural and comparatively old one and which in its most
+definite form was a dull ache of regret that this young lady’s unlucky
+star should have placed her on the stage.  He wished in his worst
+uneasiness that, without going further, she would give it up; and yet it
+soothed that uneasiness to remind himself that he saw grounds to hope she
+would go far enough to make a marked success of Nona.  There were strange
+and painful moments when, as the interpretress of Nona, he almost hated
+her; after which, however, he always assured himself that he exaggerated,
+inasmuch as what made this aversion seem great, when he was nervous, was
+simply its contrast with the growing sense that there _were_
+grounds—totally different—on which she pleased him.  She pleased him as a
+charming creature—by her sincerities and her perversities, by the
+varieties and surprises of her character and by certain happy facts of
+her person.  In private her eyes were sad to him and her voice was rare.
+He detested the idea that she should have a disappointment or an
+humiliation, and he wanted to rescue her altogether, to save and
+transplant her.  One way to save her was to see to it, to the best of his
+ability, that the production of his play should be a triumph; and the
+other way—it was really too queer to express—was almost to wish that it
+shouldn’t be.  Then, for the future, there would be safety and peace, and
+not the peace of death—the peace of a different life.  It is to be added
+that our young man clung to the former of these ways in proportion as the
+latter perversely tempted him.  He was nervous at the best, increasingly
+and intolerably nervous; but the immediate remedy was to rehearse harder
+and harder, and above all to work it out with Violet Grey.  Some of her
+comrades reproached him with working it out only with her, as if she were
+the whole affair; to which he replied that they could afford to be
+neglected, they were all so tremendously good.  She was the only person
+concerned whom he didn’t flatter.
+
+The author and the actress stuck so to the business in hand that she had
+very little time to speak to him again of Mrs. Alsager, of whom indeed
+her imagination appeared adequately to have disposed.  Wayworth once
+remarked to her that Nona Vincent was supposed to be a good deal like his
+charming friend; but she gave a blank “Supposed by whom?” in consequence
+of which he never returned to the subject.  He confided his nervousness
+as freely as usual to Mrs. Alsager, who easily understood that he had a
+peculiar complication of anxieties.  His suspense varied in degree from
+hour to hour, but any relief there might have been in this was made up
+for by its being of several different kinds.  One afternoon, as the first
+performance drew near, Mrs. Alsager said to him, in giving him his cup of
+tea and on his having mentioned that he had not closed his eyes the night
+before:
+
+“You must indeed be in a dreadful state.  Anxiety for another is still
+worse than anxiety for one’s self.”
+
+“For another?” Wayworth repeated, looking at her over the rim of his cup.
+
+“My poor friend, you’re nervous about Nona Vincent, but you’re infinitely
+more nervous about Violet Grey.”
+
+“She _is_ Nona Vincent!”
+
+“No, she isn’t—not a bit!” said Mrs. Alsager, abruptly.
+
+“Do you really think so?” Wayworth cried, spilling his tea in his alarm.
+
+“What I think doesn’t signify—I mean what I think about that.  What I
+meant to say was that great as is your suspense about your play, your
+suspense about your actress is greater still.”
+
+“I can only repeat that my actress _is_ my play.”
+
+Mrs. Alsager looked thoughtfully into the teapot.
+
+“Your actress is your—”
+
+“My what?” the young man asked, with a little tremor in his voice, as his
+hostess paused.
+
+“Your very dear friend.  You’re in love with her—at present.”  And with a
+sharp click Mrs. Alsager dropped the lid on the fragrant receptacle.
+
+“Not yet—not yet!” laughed her visitor.
+
+“You will be if she pulls you through.”
+
+“You declare that she _won’t_ pull me through.”
+
+Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment, after which she softly murmured: “I’ll
+pray for her.”
+
+“You’re the most generous of women!” Wayworth cried; then coloured as if
+the words had not been happy.  They would have done indeed little honour
+to a man of tact.
+
+The next morning he received five hurried lines from Mrs. Alsager.  She
+had suddenly been called to Torquay, to see a relation who was seriously
+ill; she should be detained there several days, but she had an earnest
+hope of being able to return in time for his first night.  In any event
+he had her unrestricted good wishes.  He missed her extremely, for these
+last days were a great strain and there was little comfort to be derived
+from Violet Grey.  She was even more nervous than himself, and so pale
+and altered that he was afraid she would be too ill to act.  It was
+settled between them that they made each other worse and that he had now
+much better leave her alone.  They had pulled Nona so to pieces that
+nothing seemed left of her—she must at least have time to grow together
+again.  He left Violet Grey alone, to the best of his ability, but she
+carried out imperfectly her own side of the bargain.  She came to him
+with new questions—she waited for him with old doubts, and half an hour
+before the last dress-rehearsal, on the eve of production, she proposed
+to him a totally fresh rendering of his heroine.  This incident gave him
+such a sense of insecurity that he turned his back on her without a word,
+bolted out of the theatre, dashed along the Strand and walked as far as
+the Bank.  Then he jumped into a hansom and came westward, and when he
+reached the theatre again the business was nearly over.  It appeared,
+almost to his disappointment, not bad enough to give him the consolation
+of the old playhouse adage that the worst dress-rehearsals make the best
+first nights.
+
+The morrow, which was a Wednesday, was the dreadful day; the theatre had
+been closed on the Monday and the Tuesday.  Every one, on the Wednesday,
+did his best to let every one else alone, and every one signally failed
+in the attempt.  The day, till seven o’clock, was understood to be
+consecrated to rest, but every one except Violet Grey turned up at the
+theatre.  Wayworth looked at Mr. Loder, and Mr. Loder looked in another
+direction, which was as near as they came to conversation.  Wayworth was
+in a fidget, unable to eat or sleep or sit still, at times almost in
+terror.  He kept quiet by keeping, as usual, in motion; he tried to walk
+away from his nervousness.  He walked in the afternoon toward Notting
+Hill, but he succeeded in not breaking the vow he had taken not to meddle
+with his actress.  She was like an acrobat poised on a slippery ball—if
+he should touch her she would topple over.  He passed her door three
+times and he thought of her three hundred.  This was the hour at which he
+most regretted that Mrs. Alsager had not come back—for he had called at
+her house only to learn that she was still at Torquay.  This was probably
+queer, and it was probably queerer still that she hadn’t written to him;
+but even of these things he wasn’t sure, for in losing, as he had now
+completely lost, his judgment of his play, he seemed to himself to have
+lost his judgment of everything.  When he went home, however, he found a
+telegram from the lady of Grosvenor Place—“Shall be able to come—reach
+town by seven.”  At half-past eight o’clock, through a little aperture in
+the curtain of the “Renaissance,” he saw her in her box with a cluster of
+friends—completely beautiful and beneficent.  The house was
+magnificent—too good for his play, he felt; too good for any play.
+Everything now seemed too good—the scenery, the furniture, the dresses,
+the very programmes.  He seized upon the idea that this was probably what
+was the matter with the representative of Nona—she was only too good.  He
+had completely arranged with this young lady the plan of their relations
+during the evening; and though they had altered everything else that they
+had arranged they had promised each other not to alter this.  It was
+wonderful the number of things they had promised each other.  He would
+start her, he would see her off—then he would quit the theatre and stay
+away till just before the end.  She besought him to stay away—it would
+make her infinitely easier.  He saw that she was exquisitely dressed—she
+had made one or two changes for the better since the night before, and
+that seemed something definite to turn over and over in his mind as he
+rumbled foggily home in the four-wheeler in which, a few steps from the
+stage-door, he had taken refuge as soon as he knew that the curtain was
+up.  He lived a couple of miles off, and he had chosen a four-wheeler to
+drag out the time.
+
+When he got home his fire was out, his room was cold, and he lay down on
+his sofa in his overcoat.  He had sent his landlady to the dress-circle,
+on purpose; she would overflow with words and mistakes.  The house seemed
+a black void, just as the streets had done—every one was, formidably, at
+his play.  He was quieter at last than he had been for a fortnight, and
+he felt too weak even to wonder how the thing was going.  He believed
+afterwards that he had slept an hour; but even if he had he felt it to be
+still too early to return to the theatre.  He sat down by his lamp and
+tried to read—to read a little compendious life of a great English
+statesman, out of a “series.”  It struck him as brilliantly clever, and
+he asked himself whether that perhaps were not rather the sort of thing
+he ought to have taken up: not the statesmanship, but the art of brief
+biography.  Suddenly he became aware that he must hurry if he was to
+reach the theatre at all—it was a quarter to eleven o’clock.  He
+scrambled out and, this time, found a hansom—he had lately spent enough
+money in cabs to add to his hope that the profits of his new profession
+would be great.  His anxiety, his suspense flamed up again, and as he
+rattled eastward—he went fast now—he was almost sick with alternations.
+As he passed into the theatre the first man—some underling—who met him,
+cried to him, breathlessly:
+
+“You’re wanted, sir—you’re wanted!”  He thought his tone very ominous—he
+devoured the man’s eyes with his own, for a betrayal: did he mean that he
+was wanted for execution?  Some one else pressed him, almost pushed him,
+forward; he was already on the stage.  Then he became conscious of a
+sound more or less continuous, but seemingly faint and far, which he took
+at first for the voice of the actors heard through their canvas walls,
+the beautiful built-in room of the last act.  But the actors were in the
+wing, they surrounded him; the curtain was down and they were coming off
+from before it.  They had been called, and _he_ was called—they all
+greeted him with “Go on—go on!”  He was terrified—he couldn’t go on—he
+didn’t believe in the applause, which seemed to him only audible enough
+to sound half-hearted.
+
+“Has it gone?—_has_ it gone?” he gasped to the people round him; and he
+heard them say “Rather—rather!” perfunctorily, mendaciously too, as it
+struck him, and even with mocking laughter, the laughter of defeat and
+despair.  Suddenly, though all this must have taken but a moment, Loder
+burst upon him from somewhere with a “For God’s sake don’t keep them, or
+they’ll _stop_!”  “But I can’t go on for _that_!”  Wayworth cried, in
+anguish; the sound seemed to him already to have ceased.  Loder had hold
+of him and was shoving him; he resisted and looked round frantically for
+Violet Grey, who perhaps would tell him the truth.  There was by this
+time a crowd in the wing, all with strange grimacing painted faces, but
+Violet was not among them and her very absence frightened him.  He
+uttered her name with an accent that he afterwards regretted—it gave
+them, as he thought, both away; and while Loder hustled him before the
+curtain he heard some one say “She took her call and disappeared.”  She
+had had a call, then—this was what was most present to the young man as
+he stood for an instant in the glare of the footlights, looking blindly
+at the great vaguely-peopled horseshoe and greeted with plaudits which
+now seemed to him at once louder than he deserved and feebler than he
+desired.  They sank to rest quickly, but he felt it to be long before he
+could back away, before he could, in his turn, seize the manager by the
+arm and cry huskily—“Has it really gone—_really_?”
+
+Mr. Loder looked at him hard and replied after an instant: “The play’s
+all right!”
+
+Wayworth hung upon his lips.  “Then what’s all wrong?”
+
+“We must do something to Miss Grey.”
+
+“What’s the matter with her?”
+
+“She isn’t _in_ it!”
+
+“Do you mean she has failed?”
+
+“Yes, damn it—she has failed.”
+
+Wayworth stared.  “Then how can the play be all right?”
+
+“Oh, we’ll save it—we’ll save it.”
+
+“Where’s Miss Grey—where _is_ she?” the young man asked.
+
+Loder caught his arm as he was turning away again to look for his
+heroine.  “Never mind her now—she knows it!”
+
+Wayworth was approached at the same moment by a gentleman he knew as one
+of Mrs. Alsager’s friends—he had perceived him in that lady’s box.  Mrs.
+Alsager was waiting there for the successful author; she desired very
+earnestly that he would come round and speak to her.  Wayworth assured
+himself first that Violet had left the theatre—one of the actresses could
+tell him that she had seen her throw on a cloak, without changing her
+dress, and had learnt afterwards that she had, the next moment, flung
+herself, after flinging her aunt, into a cab.  He had wished to invite
+half a dozen persons, of whom Miss Grey and her elderly relative were
+two, to come home to supper with him; but she had refused to make any
+engagement beforehand (it would be so dreadful to have to keep it if she
+shouldn’t have made a hit), and this attitude had blighted the pleasant
+plan, which fell to the ground.  He had called her morbid, but she was
+immovable.  Mrs. Alsager’s messenger let him know that he was expected to
+supper in Grosvenor Place, and half an hour afterwards he was seated
+there among complimentary people and flowers and popping corks, eating
+the first orderly meal he had partaken of for a week.  Mrs. Alsager had
+carried him off in her brougham—the other people who were coming got into
+things of their own.  He stopped her short as soon as she began to tell
+him how tremendously every one had been struck by the piece; he nailed
+her down to the question of Violet Grey.  Had she spoilt the play, had
+she jeopardised or compromised it—had she been utterly bad, had she been
+good in any degree?
+
+“Certainly the performance would have seemed better if _she_ had been
+better,” Mrs. Alsager confessed.
+
+“And the play would have seemed better if the performance had been
+better,” Wayworth said, gloomily, from the corner of the brougham.
+
+“She does what she can, and she has talent, and she looked lovely.  But
+she doesn’t _see_ Nona Vincent.  She doesn’t see the type—she doesn’t see
+the individual—she doesn’t see the woman you meant.  She’s out of it—she
+gives you a different person.”
+
+“Oh, the woman I meant!” the young man exclaimed, looking at the London
+lamps as he rolled by them.  “I wish to God she had known _you_!” he
+added, as the carriage stopped.  After they had passed into the house he
+said to his companion:
+
+“You see she _won’t_ pull me through.”
+
+“Forgive her—be kind to her!” Mrs. Alsager pleaded.
+
+“I shall only thank her.  The play may go to the dogs.”
+
+“If it does—if it does,” Mrs. Alsager began, with her pure eyes on him.
+
+“Well, what if it does?”
+
+She couldn’t tell him, for the rest of her guests came in together; she
+only had time to say: “It _sha’n’t_ go to the dogs!”
+
+He came away before the others, restless with the desire to go to Notting
+Hill even that night, late as it was, haunted with the sense that Violet
+Grey had measured her fall.  When he got into the street, however, he
+allowed second thoughts to counsel another course; the effect of knocking
+her up at two o’clock in the morning would hardly be to soothe her.  He
+looked at six newspapers the next day and found in them never a good word
+for her.  They were well enough about the piece, but they were unanimous
+as to the disappointment caused by the young actress whose former efforts
+had excited such hopes and on whom, on this occasion, such pressing
+responsibilities rested.  They asked in chorus what was the matter with
+her, and they declared in chorus that the play, which was not without
+promise, was handicapped (they all used the same word) by the odd want of
+correspondence between the heroine and her interpreter.  Wayworth drove
+early to Notting Hill, but he didn’t take the newspapers with him; Violet
+Grey could be trusted to have sent out for them by the peep of dawn and
+to have fed her anguish full.  She declined to see him—she only sent down
+word by her aunt that she was extremely unwell and should be unable to
+act that night unless she were suffered to spend the day unmolested and
+in bed.  Wayworth sat for an hour with the old lady, who understood
+everything and to whom he could speak frankly.  She gave him a touching
+picture of her niece’s condition, which was all the more vivid for the
+simple words in which it was expressed: “She feels she isn’t right, you
+know—she feels she isn’t right!”
+
+“Tell her it doesn’t matter—it doesn’t matter a straw!” said Wayworth.
+
+“And she’s so proud—you know how proud she is!” the old lady went on.
+
+“Tell her I’m more than satisfied, that I accept her gratefully as she
+is.”
+
+“She says she injures your play, that she ruins it,” said his
+interlocutress.
+
+“She’ll improve, immensely—she’ll grow into the part,” the young man
+continued.
+
+“She’d improve if she knew how—but she says she doesn’t.  She has given
+all she has got, and she doesn’t know what’s wanted.”
+
+“What’s wanted is simply that she should go straight on and trust me.”
+
+“How can she trust you when she feels she’s losing you?”
+
+“Losing me?” Wayworth cried.
+
+“You’ll never forgive her if your play is taken off!”
+
+“It will run six months,” said the author of the piece.
+
+The old lady laid her hand on his arm.  “What will you do for her if it
+does?”
+
+He looked at Violet Grey’s aunt a moment.  “Do you say your niece is very
+proud?”
+
+“Too proud for her dreadful profession.”
+
+“Then she wouldn’t wish you to ask me that,” Wayworth answered, getting
+up.
+
+When he reached home he was very tired, and for a person to whom it was
+open to consider that he had scored a success he spent a remarkably
+dismal day.  All his restlessness had gone, and fatigue and depression
+possessed him.  He sank into his old chair by the fire and sat there for
+hours with his eyes closed.  His landlady came in to bring his luncheon
+and mend the fire, but he feigned to be asleep, so as not to be spoken
+to.  It is to be supposed that sleep at last overtook him, for about the
+hour that dusk began to gather he had an extraordinary impression, a
+visit that, it would seem, could have belonged to no waking
+consciousness.  Nona Vincent, in face and form, the living heroine of his
+play, rose before him in his little silent room, sat down with him at his
+dingy fireside.  She was not Violet Grey, she was not Mrs. Alsager, she
+was not any woman he had seen upon earth, nor was it any masquerade of
+friendship or of penitence.  Yet she was more familiar to him than the
+women he had known best, and she was ineffably beautiful and consoling.
+She filled the poor room with her presence, the effect of which was as
+soothing as some odour of incense.  She was as quiet as an affectionate
+sister, and there was no surprise in her being there.  Nothing more real
+had ever befallen him, and nothing, somehow, more reassuring.  He felt
+her hand rest upon his own, and all his senses seemed to open to her
+message.  She struck him, in the strangest way, both as his creation and
+as his inspirer, and she gave him the happiest consciousness of success.
+If she was so charming, in the red firelight, in her vague,
+clear-coloured garments, it was because he had made her so, and yet if
+the weight seemed lifted from his spirit it was because she drew it away.
+When she bent her deep eyes upon him they seemed to speak of safety and
+freedom and to make a green garden of the future.  From time to time she
+smiled and said: “I live—I live—I live.”  How long she stayed he couldn’t
+have told, but when his landlady blundered in with the lamp Nona Vincent
+was no longer there.  He rubbed his eyes, but no dream had ever been so
+intense; and as he slowly got out of his chair it was with a deep still
+joy—the joy of the artist—in the thought of how right he had been, how
+exactly like herself he had made her.  She had come to show him that.  At
+the end of five minutes, however, he felt sufficiently mystified to call
+his landlady back—he wanted to ask her a question.  When the good woman
+reappeared the question hung fire an instant; then it shaped itself as
+the inquiry:
+
+“Has any lady been here?”
+
+“No, sir—no lady at all.”
+
+The woman seemed slightly scandalised.  “Not Miss Vincent?”
+
+“Miss Vincent, sir?”
+
+“The young lady of my play, don’t you know?”
+
+“Oh, sir, you mean Miss Violet Grey!”
+
+“No I don’t, at all.  I think I mean Mrs. Alsager.”
+
+“There has been no Mrs. Alsager, sir.”
+
+“Nor anybody at all like her?”
+
+The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenly taken him.
+Then she asked in an injured tone: “Why shouldn’t I have told you if
+you’d ’ad callers, sir?”
+
+“I thought you might have thought I was asleep.”
+
+“Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with the lamp—and well you’d earned
+it, Mr. Wayworth!”
+
+The landlady came back an hour later to bring him a telegram; it was just
+as he had begun to dress to dine at his club and go down to the theatre.
+
+“See me to-night in front, and don’t come near me till it’s over.”
+
+It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes for the
+evening.  He obeyed them to the letter; he watched her from the depths of
+a box.  He was in no position to say how she might have struck him the
+night before, but what he saw during these charmed hours filled him with
+admiration and gratitude.  She _was_ in it, this time; she had pulled
+herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at every
+turn.  Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a position to judge,
+and as he judged he exulted.  He was thrilled and carried away, and he
+was moreover intensely curious to know what had happened to her, by what
+unfathomable art she had managed in a few hours to effect such a change
+of base.  It was as if _she_ had had a revelation of Nona, so convincing
+a clearness had been breathed upon the picture.  He kept himself quiet in
+the _entr’actes_—he would speak to her only at the end; but before the
+play was half over the manager burst into his box.
+
+“It’s prodigious, what she’s up to!” cried Mr. Loder, almost more
+bewildered than gratified.  “She has gone in for a new reading—a blessed
+somersault in the air!”
+
+“Is it quite different?” Wayworth asked, sharing his mystification.
+
+“Different?  Hyperion to a satyr!  It’s devilish good, my boy!”
+
+“It’s devilish good,” said Wayworth, “and it’s in a different key
+altogether from the key of her rehearsal.”
+
+“I’ll run you six months!” the manager declared; and he rushed round
+again to the actress, leaving Wayworth with a sense that she had already
+pulled him through.  She had with the audience an immense personal
+success.
+
+When he went behind, at the end, he had to wait for her; she only showed
+herself when she was ready to leave the theatre.  Her aunt had been in
+her dressing-room with her, and the two ladies appeared together.  The
+girl passed him quickly, motioning him to say nothing till they should
+have got out of the place.  He saw that she was immensely excited, lifted
+altogether above her common artistic level.  The old lady said to him:
+“You must come home to supper with us: it has been all arranged.”  They
+had a brougham, with a little third seat, and he got into it with them.
+It was a long time before the actress would speak.  She leaned back in
+her corner, giving no sign but still heaving a little, like a subsiding
+sea, and with all her triumph in the eyes that shone through the
+darkness.  The old lady was hushed to awe, or at least to discretion, and
+Wayworth was happy enough to wait.  He had really to wait till they had
+alighted at Notting Hill, where the elder of his companions went to see
+that supper had been attended to.
+
+“I was better—I was better,” said Violet Grey, throwing off her cloak in
+the little drawing-room.
+
+“You were perfection.  You’ll be like that every night, won’t you?”
+
+She smiled at him.  “Every night?  There can scarcely be a miracle every
+day.”
+
+“What do you mean by a miracle?”
+
+“I’ve had a revelation.”
+
+Wayward stared.  “At what hour?”
+
+“The right hour—this afternoon.  Just in time to save me—and to save
+_you_.”
+
+“At five o’clock?  Do you mean you had a visit?”
+
+“She came to me—she stayed two hours.”
+
+“Two hours?  Nona Vincent?”
+
+“Mrs. Alsager.”  Violet Grey smiled more deeply.  “It’s the same thing.”
+
+“And how did Mrs. Alsager save you?”
+
+“By letting me look at her.  By letting me hear her speak.  By letting me
+know her.”
+
+“And what did she say to you?”
+
+“Kind things—encouraging, intelligent things.”
+
+“Ah, the dear woman!” Wayworth cried.
+
+“You ought to like her—she likes _you_.  She was just what I wanted,” the
+actress added.
+
+“Do you mean she talked to you about Nona?”
+
+“She said you thought she was like her.  She _is_—she’s exquisite.”
+
+“She’s exquisite,” Wayworth repeated.  “Do you mean she tried to coach
+you?”
+
+“Oh, no—she only said she would be so glad if it would help me to see
+her.  And I felt it did help me.  I don’t know what took place—she only
+sat there, and she held my hand and smiled at me, and she had tact and
+grace, and she had goodness and beauty, and she soothed my nerves and
+lighted up my imagination.  Somehow she seemed to _give_ it all to me.  I
+took it—I took it.  I kept her before me, I drank her in.  For the first
+time, in the whole study of the part, I had my model—I could make my
+copy.  All my courage came back to me, and other things came that I
+hadn’t felt before.  She was different—she was delightful; as I’ve said,
+she was a revelation.  She kissed me when she went away—and you may guess
+if I kissed _her_.  We were awfully affectionate, but it’s _you_ she
+likes!” said Violet Grey.
+
+Wayworth had never been more interested in his life, and he had rarely
+been more mystified.  “Did she wear vague, clear-coloured garments?” he
+asked, after a moment.
+
+Violet Grey stared, laughed, then bade him go in to supper.  “_You_ know
+how she dresses!”
+
+He was very well pleased at supper, but he was silent and a little
+solemn.  He said he would go to see Mrs. Alsager the next day.  He did
+so, but he was told at her door that she had returned to Torquay.  She
+remained there all winter, all spring, and the next time he saw her his
+play had run two hundred nights and he had married Violet Grey.  His
+plays sometimes succeed, but his wife is not in them now, nor in any
+others.  At these representations Mrs. Alsager continues frequently to be
+present.
+
+
+
+
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