9 files changed, 5059 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/2717-0.txt b/2717-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb3c892
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2717-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1654 @@
+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.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONA VINCENT***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 2717-0.txt or 2717-0.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/7/1/2717
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  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.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/2717-0.zip b/2717-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..afd8f33
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2717-0.zip
diff --git a/2717-h.zip b/2717-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bd0894c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2717-h.zip
diff --git a/2717-h/2717-h.htm b/2717-h/2717-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45579cc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2717-h/2717-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,1775 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html
+     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Nona Vincent, by Henry James</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    P {  margin-top: .75em;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    P.gutsumm { margin-left: 5%;}
+    P.poetry {margin-left: 3%; }
+    .GutSmall { font-size: 0.7em; }
+    H1, H2 {
+         text-align: center;
+		margin-top: 2em;
+		margin-bottom: 2em;
+         }
+    H3, H4, H5 {
+	text-align: center;
+	margin-top: 1em;
+	margin-bottom: 1em;
+	}
+    BODY{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+ table { border-collapse: collapse; }
+table {margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;}
+    td { vertical-align: top; border: 1px solid black;}
+    td p { margin: 0.2em; }
+    .blkquot  {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */
+
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    .pagenum {position: absolute;
+               left: 92%;
+               font-size: small;
+               text-align: right;
+		font-weight: normal;
+               color: gray;
+               }
+    img { border: none; }
+    img.dc { float: left; width: 50px; height: 50px; }
+    p.gutindent { margin-left: 2em; }
+    div.gapspace { height: 0.8em; }
+    div.gapline { height: 0.8em; width: 100%; border-top: 1px solid;} 
+    div.gapmediumline { height: 0.3em; width: 40%; margin-left:30%;
+                  border-top: 1px solid; }
+    div.gapmediumdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 40%; margin-left:30%;
+		  border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;}
+     div.gapshortdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 20%;
+                  margin-left: 40%; border-top: 1px solid;
+                  border-bottom: 1px solid; }
+    div.gapdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 50%;
+                  margin-left: 25%; border-top: 1px solid;
+                  border-bottom: 1px solid;}
+    div.gapshortline { height: 0.3em; width: 20%; margin-left:40%;
+		  border-top: 1px solid; }
+    .citation {vertical-align: super;
+               font-size: .8em;
+               text-decoration: none;}
+    img.floatleft { float: left;
+			margin-right: 1em;
+			margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; }
+    img.floatright { float: right;
+			margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0.5em;
+			margin-bottom: 0.5em; }
+    img.clearcenter {display: block;
+			margin-left: auto;
+			margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0.5em;
+			margin-bottom: 0.5em}
+    -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<pre>
+
+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: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONA VINCENT***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.&nbsp; Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua
+Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.</p>
+<h1>NONA VINCENT.</h1>
+<h2>I.</h2>
+<p>&ldquo;I <span class="smcap">wondered</span> whether you
+wouldn&rsquo;t read it to me,&rdquo; said Mrs. Alsager, as they
+lingered a little near the fire before he took leave.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was eight-and-twenty, but
+he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and
+curiosities and disappointments.&nbsp; The opportunity to talk of
+some of these in Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the
+immense inconvenience of London.&nbsp; This inconvenience took
+for him principally the line of insensibility to Allan
+Wayworth&rsquo;s literary form.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He kept the revelation to himself, and indeed
+there was nothing to turn his head in the kindness of a kind
+woman.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+His ideas were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the good
+fortune to be carried out by a person of perfect delicacy.&nbsp;
+Her delicacy made her play strange tricks with them, but he never
+found this out.&nbsp; She attenuated him without his knowing it,
+for what he mainly thought was that he had aggrandised
+<i>her</i>.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She felt a tremulous need
+to throw her liberty and her leisure into the things of the
+soul&mdash;the most beautiful things she knew.&nbsp; She found
+them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred places, and
+particularly in a dim and sacred region&mdash;the region of
+active pity&mdash;over her entrance into which she dropped
+curtains so thick that it would have been an impertinence to lift
+them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She loved the perfect
+work&mdash;she had the artistic chord.&nbsp; This chord could
+vibrate only to the touch of another, so that appreciation, in
+her spirit, had the added intensity of regret.&nbsp; She could
+understand the joy of creation, and she thought it scarcely
+enough to be told that she herself created happiness.&nbsp; She
+would have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just
+here that her liberty failed her.&nbsp; She had not the
+voice&mdash;she had only the vision.&nbsp; The only envy she was
+capable of was directed to those who, as she said, could do
+something.</p>
+<p>As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was
+admirably hospitable to such people as a class.&nbsp; She
+believed Allan Wayworth could do something, and she liked to hear
+him talk of the ways in which he meant to show it.&nbsp; He
+talked of them almost to no one else&mdash;she spoiled him for
+other listeners.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; How in
+the world could she express better?&nbsp; There was less than
+that in Shakespeare and Beethoven.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve done it, I&rsquo;ve done
+it!&rdquo;&nbsp; She made him tell her all about it&mdash;she
+took an interest really minute and asked questions delightfully
+apt.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Once he had
+gone with her&mdash;the time she took that stupid Mrs.
+Mostyn.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Finally, on Christmas day,
+by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The young man&rsquo;s beginnings in
+London were difficult, and he had aggravated them by his dislike
+of journalism.&nbsp; His father&rsquo;s connection with it would
+have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of his friends
+judged&mdash;the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager)
+<i>intraitable</i> on the question of form.&nbsp; Form&mdash;in
+his sense&mdash;was not demanded by English newspapers, and he
+couldn&rsquo;t give it to them in <i>their</i> sense.&nbsp; The
+demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth spent costly
+weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that
+didn&rsquo;t pay for style.&nbsp; The only person who paid for it
+was really Mrs. Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for the
+perfect.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t receive his legal dues his palm was at least
+occasionally conscious of a gratuity.&nbsp; He had his
+limitations, his perversities, but the finest parts of him were
+the most alive, and he was restless and sincere.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There were some usual bad things he
+would never do&mdash;too many prohibitive puddles for him in the
+short cut to success.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was hedged about with sordid approaches, it
+was not worth sacrifice and suffering.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Aspects change, however, with the
+point of view: Wayworth had waked up one morning in a different
+bed altogether.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s life to follow some of the
+consequences.&nbsp; He had been made (as he felt) the subject of
+a special revelation, and he wore his hat like a man in
+love.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The scenic idea was magnificent when
+once you had embraced it&mdash;the dramatic form had a purity
+which made some others look ingloriously rough.&nbsp; It had the
+high dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and
+architectural.&nbsp; It was full of the refreshment of
+calculation and construction, the incorruptibility of line and
+law.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was a
+fearful amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare
+intensity.&nbsp; 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&mdash;a motion as rhythmic as the dance of a
+goddess!&nbsp; Wayworth took long London walks and thought of
+these things&mdash;London poured into his ears the mighty hum of
+its suggestion.&nbsp; His imagination glowed and melted down
+material, his intentions multiplied and made the air a golden
+haze.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The more he tried the
+dramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it the
+more he perceived in it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Her eyes were full of tears when he read her
+the last words of the finished work, and she murmured,
+divinely&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now&mdash;to get it done, to get it
+done!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, indeed&mdash;to get it done!&rdquo; Wayworth
+stared at the fire, slowly rolling up his type-copy.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But that&rsquo;s a totally different part of the business,
+and altogether secondary.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But of course you want to be acted?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course I do&mdash;but it&rsquo;s a sudden
+descent.&nbsp; I want to intensely, but I&rsquo;m sorry I want
+to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s there indeed that the difficulties
+begin,&rdquo; said Mrs. Alsager, a little off her guard.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can you say that?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s there that they
+end!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, wait to see where they end!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I mean they&rsquo;ll now be of a totally different
+order,&rdquo; Wayworth explained.&nbsp; &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, they&rsquo;re not inspiring,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Alsager; &ldquo;they&rsquo;re discouraging, because they&rsquo;re
+vulgar.&nbsp; The other problem, the working out of the thing
+itself, is pure art.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How well you understand everything!&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+young man had got up, nervously, and was leaning against the
+chimney-piece with his back to the fire and his arms
+folded.&nbsp; The roll of his copy, in his fist, was squeezed
+into the hollow of one of them.&nbsp; He looked down at Mrs.
+Alsager, smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile
+from eyes still charmed and suffused.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, the
+vulgarity will begin now,&rdquo; he presently added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll suffer dreadfully.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall suffer in a good cause.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, giving <i>that</i> to the world!&nbsp; You must
+leave it with me, I must read it over and over,&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; &ldquo;Who in the world will do
+it?&mdash;who in the world <i>can</i>?&rdquo; she went on, close
+to him, turning over the leaves.&nbsp; Before he could answer she
+had stopped at one of the pages; she turned the book round to
+him, pointing out a speech.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s the most
+beautiful place&mdash;those lines are a perfection.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He glanced at the spot she indicated, and she begged him to read
+them again&mdash;he had read them admirably before.&nbsp; He knew
+them by heart, and, closing the book while she held the other end
+of it, he murmured them over to her&mdash;they had indeed a
+cadence that pleased him&mdash;watching, with a facetious
+complacency which he hoped was pardonable, the applause in her
+face.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ah, who can utter such lines as
+<i>that</i>?&rdquo; Mrs. Alsager broke out; &ldquo;whom can you
+find to do <i>her</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll find people to do them all!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But not people who are worthy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;ll be worthy enough if they&rsquo;re willing
+enough.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll work with them&mdash;I&rsquo;ll grind it
+into them.&rdquo;&nbsp; He spoke as if he had produced twenty
+plays.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, it will be interesting!&rdquo; she echoed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But I shall have to find my theatre first.&nbsp; I
+shall have to get a manager to believe in me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes&mdash;they&rsquo;re so stupid!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall
+have to watch and wait,&rdquo; said Allan Wayworth.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Do you see me hawking it about London?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed I don&rsquo;t&mdash;it would be
+sickening.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s what I shall have to do.&nbsp; I shall be
+old before it&rsquo;s produced.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall be old very soon if it isn&rsquo;t!&rdquo; Mrs.
+Alsager cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;I know one or two of them,&rdquo; she
+mused.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean you would speak to them?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The thing is to get them to read it.&nbsp; I could do
+that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the utmost I ask.&nbsp; But it&rsquo;s
+even for that I shall have to wait.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t wait.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, you dear lady!&rdquo; Wayworth murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That is <i>you</i> may, but <i>I</i> won&rsquo;t!&nbsp;
+Will you leave me your copy?&rdquo; she went on, turning the
+pages again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly; I have another.&rdquo;&nbsp; Standing near
+him she read to herself a passage here and there; then, in her
+sweet voice, she read some of them out.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, if
+<i>you</i> were only an actress!&rdquo; the young man
+exclaimed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the last thing I am.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s
+no comedy in <i>me</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good
+genius.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is there any tragedy?&rdquo; he asked, with
+the levity of complete confidence.</p>
+<p>She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming
+laugh and a &ldquo;Perhaps that will be for you to
+determine!&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and
+Mrs. Alsager had taken a tremendous fancy to her.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+can&rsquo;t <i>tell</i> you how I like that woman!&rdquo; she
+exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only be
+balm to the artistic spirit.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m awfully glad she lives a bit.&nbsp; What I
+feel about her is that she&rsquo;s a good deal like
+<i>you</i>,&rdquo; Wayworth observed.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red.&nbsp;
+This was evidently a view that failed to strike her; she
+didn&rsquo;t, however, treat it as a joke.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+not impressed with the resemblance.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t see
+myself doing what she does.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t so much what she <i>does</i>,&rdquo; the
+young man argued, drawing out his moustache.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But what she does is the whole point.&nbsp; She simply
+tells her love&mdash;I should never do that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy,
+why do you like her for it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t what I like her for.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What else, then?&nbsp; That&rsquo;s intensely
+characteristic.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the
+air of having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from.&nbsp; But the
+one she produced was unexpectedly simple; it might even have been
+prompted by despair at not finding others.&nbsp; &ldquo;I like
+her because <i>you</i> made her!&rdquo; she exclaimed with a
+laugh, moving again away from her companion.</p>
+<p>Wayworth laughed still louder.&nbsp; &ldquo;You made her a
+little yourself.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve thought of her as looking like
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She ought to look much better,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Alsager.&nbsp; &ldquo;No, certainly, I shouldn&rsquo;t do what
+<i>she</i> does.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not even in the same circumstances?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I should never find myself in such circumstances.&nbsp;
+They&rsquo;re exactly your play, and have nothing in common with
+such a life as mine.&nbsp; However,&rdquo; Mrs. Alsager went on,
+&ldquo;her behaviour was natural for <i>her</i>, and not only
+natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and
+noble.&nbsp; I can&rsquo;t sufficiently admire the talent and
+tact with which you make one accept it, and I tell you frankly
+that it&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent as
+intensely as I feel that I don&rsquo;t resemble her!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t exaggerate that,&rdquo; said Allan
+Wayworth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My admiration?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your dissimilarity.&nbsp; She has your face, your air,
+your voice, your motion; she has many elements of your
+being.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then she&rsquo;ll damn your play!&rdquo; Mrs. Alsager
+replied.&nbsp; They joked a little over this, though it was not
+in the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth&rsquo;s hostess soon
+remarked: &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got your remedy, however: have her
+done by the right woman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, have her &lsquo;done&rsquo;&mdash;have her
+&lsquo;done&rsquo;!&rdquo; the young man gently wailed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see what you mean, my poor friend.&nbsp; What a pity,
+when it&rsquo;s such a magnificent part&mdash;such a chance for a
+clever serious girl!&nbsp; Nona Vincent is practically your
+play&mdash;it will be open to her to carry it far or to drop it
+at the first corner.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a charming prospect,&rdquo; said Allan
+Wayworth, with sudden scepticism.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is not to be
+supposed, however, that the knowledge that Mrs. Alsager would
+help him made Wayworth less eager to help himself.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 encyclop&aelig;dic rates, had
+the consequence of making one resigned and verbose.&nbsp; He
+couldn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; He had
+knocked at the door of every theatre in London, and, at a ruinous
+expense, had multiplied type-copies of <i>Nona Vincent</i> to
+replace the neat transcripts that had descended into the
+managerial abyss.&nbsp; His play was not even declined&mdash;no
+such flattering intimation was given him that it had been
+read.&nbsp; What the managers would do for Mrs. Alsager concerned
+him little today; the thing that was relevant was that they would
+do nothing for <i>him</i>.&nbsp; That charming woman felt humbled
+to the earth, so little response had she had from the powers on
+which she counted.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Success seemed a colourless name for the
+reward of his patience; something fiercely florid, something
+sanguinolent was more to the point.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>Shortly before the time he had fixed for his return he
+received from Mrs. Alsager a telegram consisting of the words:
+&ldquo;Loder wishes see you&mdash;putting <i>Nona</i> instant
+rehearsal.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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&mdash;a relief, however, accompanied with
+speculative glances at London and the morrow.&nbsp; Loder, as our
+young man was aware, meant the new &ldquo;Renaissance,&rdquo; but
+though he reached home in the evening it was not to this
+convenient modern theatre that Wayworth first proceeded.&nbsp; He
+spent a late hour with Mrs. Alsager, an hour that throbbed with
+calculation.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It had been cast, with a
+margin for objections, and Violet Grey was to do the
+heroine.&nbsp; She had been capable, while he was away, of a good
+piece of work at that foggy old playhouse the
+&ldquo;Legitimate;&rdquo; the piece was a clumsy
+<i>r&eacute;chauff&eacute;</i>, but she at least had been
+fresh.&nbsp; Wayworth remembered Violet Grey&mdash;hadn&rsquo;t
+he, for two years, on a fond policy of &ldquo;looking out,&rdquo;
+kept dipping into the London theatres to pick up prospective
+interpreters?&nbsp; He had not picked up many as yet, and this
+young lady at all events had never wriggled in his net.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Mrs. Alsager was
+different&mdash;she declared that she had been struck not a
+little by some of her tones.&nbsp; The girl was interesting in
+the thing at the &ldquo;Legitimate,&rdquo; and Mr. Loder, who had
+his eye on her, described her as ambitious and intelligent.&nbsp;
+She wanted awfully to get on&mdash;and some of those ladies were
+so lazy!&nbsp; Wayworth was sceptical&mdash;he had seen Miss
+Violet Grey, who was terribly itinerant, in a dozen theatres but
+only in one aspect.&nbsp; 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!&nbsp;
+Talking the matter over with Mrs. Alsager now seemed the very
+stuff that rehearsal was made of.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t so much as raise an eyebrow at the scene-painter
+if he should give him an old oak chamber.</p>
+<p>He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would be
+other than this, and yet he couldn&rsquo;t have expressed to
+himself what it would be.&nbsp; Danger was there,
+doubtless&mdash;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.&nbsp; Nothing could undermine that, since it was victory
+simply to be acted.&nbsp; It would be victory even to be acted
+badly; a reflection that didn&rsquo;t prevent him, however, from
+banishing, in his politic optimism, the word &ldquo;bad&rdquo;
+from his vocabulary.&nbsp; It had no application, in the
+compromise of practice; it didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He watched Miss Violet Grey that evening
+with eyes that sought to penetrate her possibilities.&nbsp; 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&mdash;a
+circumstance all the more creditable as the part she was playing
+seemed to him desperately so.&nbsp; He perceived that this was
+why it pleased the audience; he divined that it was the part they
+enjoyed rather than the actress.&nbsp; He had a private panic,
+wondering how, if they liked <i>that</i> form, they could
+possibly like his.&nbsp; His form had now become quite an
+ultimate idea to him.&nbsp; By the time the evening was over some
+of Miss Violet Grey&rsquo;s features, several of the turns of her
+head, a certain vibration of her voice, had taken their place in
+the same category.&nbsp; She <i>was</i> interesting, she was
+distinguished; at any rate he had accepted her: it came to the
+same thing.&nbsp; But he left the theatre that night without
+speaking to her&mdash;moved (a little even to his own
+mystification) by an odd procrastinating impulse.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s person, what subsisted in his vision was simply
+Violet Grey in Nona&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Legitimate.&rdquo;&nbsp; Before
+he went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs.
+Alsager&mdash;&ldquo;She&rsquo;s not a bit like it, but I dare
+say I can make her do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The
+whole affair loomed large to him and he magnified it and mapped
+it out.&nbsp; He enjoyed his occupation of the big, dim, hollow
+theatre, full of the echoes of &ldquo;effect&rdquo; and of a
+queer smell of gas and success&mdash;it all seemed such a passive
+canvas for his picture.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was
+surprised at what Loder appeared ready to do, though he reminded
+himself that he must never show it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; What came later was the doing of others; but
+this, with its imperfections and failures, was all his own.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Her
+companions gave discernible signs of recognising the passages of
+comedy; yet Wayworth forgave her even then for being
+inexpressive.&nbsp; She evidently wished before everything else
+to be simply sure of what it was all about.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He
+guessed, after a little, that she was puzzled and even somewhat
+frightened&mdash;to a certain extent she had not
+understood.&nbsp; 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
+<i>had</i> understood, she had understood wrong.&nbsp; If she was
+crude it was only a reason the more for talking to her; he kept
+saying to her &ldquo;Ask me&mdash;ask me: ask me everything you
+can think of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;make it stand or fall by one poor
+nervous girl.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t do and the things
+she could.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I say&mdash;I say!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter?&rdquo; Wayworth asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad to see Miss Grey is taking such pains
+with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes&mdash;she&rsquo;ll turn me out!&rdquo; said the
+young man, gaily.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>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
+<i>they</i> were doing it&mdash;it was a caution!) took it out of
+one&mdash;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.&nbsp; She had, naturally, never been more interested
+than now in his work; she wanted to hear everything about
+everything.&nbsp; She treated him as heroically fatigued, plied
+him with luxurious restoratives, made him stretch himself on
+cushions and rose-leaves.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Like Allan Wayworth she found her encouraging only by
+fits, for she had fine flashes of badness.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She was like a knife without an edge&mdash;good
+steel that had never been sharpened; she hacked away at her hard
+dramatic loaf, she couldn&rsquo;t cut it smooth.</p>
+<h2>II.</h2>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Certainly</span> my leading lady
+won&rsquo;t make Nona much like <i>you</i>!&rdquo; Wayworth one
+day gloomily remarked to Mrs. Alsager.&nbsp; There were days when
+the prospect seemed to him awful.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So much the better.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s no necessity
+for that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I wish you&rsquo;d train her a little&mdash;you could
+so easily,&rdquo; the young man went on; in response to which
+Mrs. Alsager requested him not to make such cruel fun of
+her.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She was a charming, exemplary person, educated,
+cultivated, with highly modern tastes, an excellent
+musician.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+books and who, it appeared, had once written a Christmas
+pantomime.&nbsp; It was quite an artistic home&mdash;not on the
+scale of Mrs. Alsager&rsquo;s (to compare the smallest things
+with the greatest!) but intensely refined and honourable.&nbsp;
+Wayworth went so far as to hint that it would be rather nice and
+human on Mrs. Alsager&rsquo;s part to go there&mdash;they would
+take it so kindly if she should call on them.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But this one appeared to fall to the ground, so that
+he let the subject drop.&nbsp; Mrs. Alsager, however, went yet
+once more to the &ldquo;Legitimate,&rdquo; as he found by her
+saying to him abruptly, on the morrow: &ldquo;Oh, she&rsquo;ll be
+very good&mdash;she&rsquo;ll be very good.&rdquo;&nbsp; When they
+said &ldquo;she,&rdquo; in these days, they always meant Violet
+Grey, though they pretended, for the most part, that they meant
+Nona Vincent.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; Wayworth assented, &ldquo;she wants so
+to!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment; then she asked, a little
+inconsequently, as if she had come back from a reverie:
+&ldquo;Does she want to <i>very</i> much?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tremendously&mdash;and it appears she has been
+fascinated by the part from the first.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why then didn&rsquo;t she say so?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, because she&rsquo;s so funny.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She <i>is</i> funny,&rdquo; said Mrs. Alsager,
+musingly; and presently she added: &ldquo;She&rsquo;s in love
+with you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wayworth stared, blushed very red, then laughed out.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;What is there funny in that?&rdquo; he demanded; but
+before his interlocutress could satisfy him on this point he
+inquired, further, how she knew anything about it.&nbsp; After a
+little graceful evasion she explained that the night before, at
+the &ldquo;Legitimate,&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;behind.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Mrs. Beaumont offered on the spot to take her round, and the
+fancy had seized her to accept the invitation.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s secret.&nbsp; Wayworth qualified
+it as a senseless thing, but wished to know what had led to the
+discovery.&nbsp; She characterised this inquiry as superficial
+for a painter of the ways of women; and he doubtless didn&rsquo;t
+improve it by remarking profanely that a cat might look at a king
+and that such things were convenient to know.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; To
+this Wayworth, who now professed to hate talking about the
+passions he might have inspired, could only reply that he meant
+it couldn&rsquo;t make a difference to Mrs. Alsager.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How in the world do you know what makes a difference to
+<i>me</i>?&rdquo; this lady asked, with incongruous coldness,
+with a haughtiness indeed remarkable in so gentle a spirit.</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s in love with you,&rdquo; the actress said,
+after he had made a show of ignorance; &ldquo;doesn&rsquo;t that
+tell you anything?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t care, for you&rsquo;re not in love
+with <i>her</i>!&rdquo; the girl continued.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did she tell you that too?&rdquo; Wayworth asked; but
+she had at that moment to go on.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; She was perpetually doing things out
+of rehearsal (she did two or three to-night, in the other
+man&rsquo;s piece), that he as often wished to heaven Nona
+Vincent might have the benefit of.&nbsp; She appeared to be able
+to do them for every one but him&mdash;that is for every one but
+Nona.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s
+unlucky star should have placed her on the stage.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 <i>were</i> grounds&mdash;totally different&mdash;on
+which she pleased him.&nbsp; She pleased him as a charming
+creature&mdash;by her sincerities and her perversities, by the
+varieties and surprises of her character and by certain happy
+facts of her person.&nbsp; In private her eyes were sad to him
+and her voice was rare.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;it was really too queer to express&mdash;was almost to
+wish that it shouldn&rsquo;t be.&nbsp; Then, for the future,
+there would be safety and peace, and not the peace of
+death&mdash;the peace of a different life.&nbsp; It is to be
+added that our young man clung to the former of these ways in
+proportion as the latter perversely tempted him.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She was
+the only person concerned whom he didn&rsquo;t flatter.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Wayworth once remarked to her that Nona
+Vincent was supposed to be a good deal like his charming friend;
+but she gave a blank &ldquo;Supposed by whom?&rdquo; in
+consequence of which he never returned to the subject.&nbsp; He
+confided his nervousness as freely as usual to Mrs. Alsager, who
+easily understood that he had a peculiar complication of
+anxieties.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must indeed be in a dreadful state.&nbsp; Anxiety
+for another is still worse than anxiety for one&rsquo;s
+self.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For another?&rdquo; Wayworth repeated, looking at her
+over the rim of his cup.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My poor friend, you&rsquo;re nervous about Nona
+Vincent, but you&rsquo;re infinitely more nervous about Violet
+Grey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She <i>is</i> Nona Vincent!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, she isn&rsquo;t&mdash;not a bit!&rdquo; said Mrs.
+Alsager, abruptly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you really think so?&rdquo; Wayworth cried, spilling
+his tea in his alarm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I think doesn&rsquo;t signify&mdash;I mean what I
+think about that.&nbsp; What I meant to say was that great as is
+your suspense about your play, your suspense about your actress
+is greater still.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can only repeat that my actress <i>is</i> my
+play.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Alsager looked thoughtfully into the teapot.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your actress is your&mdash;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My what?&rdquo; the young man asked, with a little
+tremor in his voice, as his hostess paused.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your very dear friend.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re in love with
+her&mdash;at present.&rdquo;&nbsp; And with a sharp click Mrs.
+Alsager dropped the lid on the fragrant receptacle.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not yet&mdash;not yet!&rdquo; laughed her visitor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You will be if she pulls you through.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You declare that she <i>won&rsquo;t</i> pull me
+through.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment, after which she softly
+murmured: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pray for her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re the most generous of women!&rdquo;
+Wayworth cried; then coloured as if the words had not been
+happy.&nbsp; They would have done indeed little honour to a man
+of tact.</p>
+<p>The next morning he received five hurried lines from Mrs.
+Alsager.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; In any event he had her
+unrestricted good wishes.&nbsp; He missed her extremely, for
+these last days were a great strain and there was little comfort
+to be derived from Violet Grey.&nbsp; She was even more nervous
+than himself, and so pale and altered that he was afraid she
+would be too ill to act.&nbsp; It was settled between them that
+they made each other worse and that he had now much better leave
+her alone.&nbsp; They had pulled Nona so to pieces that nothing
+seemed left of her&mdash;she must at least have time to grow
+together again.&nbsp; He left Violet Grey alone, to the best of
+his ability, but she carried out imperfectly her own side of the
+bargain.&nbsp; She came to him with new questions&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Then he jumped into a
+hansom and came westward, and when he reached the theatre again
+the business was nearly over.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>The morrow, which was a Wednesday, was the dreadful day; the
+theatre had been closed on the Monday and the Tuesday.&nbsp;
+Every one, on the Wednesday, did his best to let every one else
+alone, and every one signally failed in the attempt.&nbsp; The
+day, till seven o&rsquo;clock, was understood to be consecrated
+to rest, but every one except Violet Grey turned up at the
+theatre.&nbsp; Wayworth looked at Mr. Loder, and Mr. Loder looked
+in another direction, which was as near as they came to
+conversation.&nbsp; Wayworth was in a fidget, unable to eat or
+sleep or sit still, at times almost in terror.&nbsp; He kept
+quiet by keeping, as usual, in motion; he tried to walk away from
+his nervousness.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She was like an acrobat poised
+on a slippery ball&mdash;if he should touch her she would topple
+over.&nbsp; He passed her door three times and he thought of her
+three hundred.&nbsp; This was the hour at which he most regretted
+that Mrs. Alsager had not come back&mdash;for he had called at
+her house only to learn that she was still at Torquay.&nbsp; This
+was probably queer, and it was probably queerer still that she
+hadn&rsquo;t written to him; but even of these things he
+wasn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; When he went home, however, he
+found a telegram from the lady of Grosvenor
+Place&mdash;&ldquo;Shall be able to come&mdash;reach town by
+seven.&rdquo;&nbsp; At half-past eight o&rsquo;clock, through a
+little aperture in the curtain of the &ldquo;Renaissance,&rdquo;
+he saw her in her box with a cluster of friends&mdash;completely
+beautiful and beneficent.&nbsp; The house was
+magnificent&mdash;too good for his play, he felt; too good for
+any play.&nbsp; Everything now seemed too good&mdash;the scenery,
+the furniture, the dresses, the very programmes.&nbsp; He seized
+upon the idea that this was probably what was the matter with the
+representative of Nona&mdash;she was only too good.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was wonderful the number of
+things they had promised each other.&nbsp; He would start her, he
+would see her off&mdash;then he would quit the theatre and stay
+away till just before the end.&nbsp; She besought him to stay
+away&mdash;it would make her infinitely easier.&nbsp; He saw that
+she was exquisitely dressed&mdash;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.&nbsp; He lived a couple of miles off, and he had
+chosen a four-wheeler to drag out the time.</p>
+<p>When he got home his fire was out, his room was cold, and he
+lay down on his sofa in his overcoat.&nbsp; He had sent his
+landlady to the dress-circle, on purpose; she would overflow with
+words and mistakes.&nbsp; The house seemed a black void, just as
+the streets had done&mdash;every one was, formidably, at his
+play.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He sat down by his lamp and tried to
+read&mdash;to read a little compendious life of a great English
+statesman, out of a &ldquo;series.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Suddenly
+he became aware that he must hurry if he was to reach the theatre
+at all&mdash;it was a quarter to eleven o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; He
+scrambled out and, this time, found a hansom&mdash;he had lately
+spent enough money in cabs to add to his hope that the profits of
+his new profession would be great.&nbsp; His anxiety, his
+suspense flamed up again, and as he rattled eastward&mdash;he
+went fast now&mdash;he was almost sick with alternations.&nbsp;
+As he passed into the theatre the first man&mdash;some
+underling&mdash;who met him, cried to him, breathlessly:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re wanted, sir&mdash;you&rsquo;re
+wanted!&rdquo;&nbsp; He thought his tone very ominous&mdash;he
+devoured the man&rsquo;s eyes with his own, for a betrayal: did
+he mean that he was wanted for execution?&nbsp; Some one else
+pressed him, almost pushed him, forward; he was already on the
+stage.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But the actors
+were in the wing, they surrounded him; the curtain was down and
+they were coming off from before it.&nbsp; They had been called,
+and <i>he</i> was called&mdash;they all greeted him with
+&ldquo;Go on&mdash;go on!&rdquo;&nbsp; He was terrified&mdash;he
+couldn&rsquo;t go on&mdash;he didn&rsquo;t believe in the
+applause, which seemed to him only audible enough to sound
+half-hearted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Has it gone?&mdash;<i>has</i> it gone?&rdquo; he gasped
+to the people round him; and he heard them say
+&ldquo;Rather&mdash;rather!&rdquo; perfunctorily, mendaciously
+too, as it struck him, and even with mocking laughter, the
+laughter of defeat and despair.&nbsp; Suddenly, though all this
+must have taken but a moment, Loder burst upon him from somewhere
+with a &ldquo;For God&rsquo;s sake don&rsquo;t keep them, or
+they&rsquo;ll <i>stop</i>!&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;But I can&rsquo;t
+go on for <i>that</i>!&rdquo;&nbsp; Wayworth cried, in anguish;
+the sound seemed to him already to have ceased.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He uttered her name
+with an accent that he afterwards regretted&mdash;it gave them,
+as he thought, both away; and while Loder hustled him before the
+curtain he heard some one say &ldquo;She took her call and
+disappeared.&rdquo;&nbsp; She had had a call, then&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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&mdash;&ldquo;Has it
+really gone&mdash;<i>really</i>?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Loder looked at him hard and replied after an instant:
+&ldquo;The play&rsquo;s all right!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wayworth hung upon his lips.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then what&rsquo;s
+all wrong?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We must do something to Miss Grey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the matter with her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She isn&rsquo;t <i>in</i> it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean she has failed?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, damn it&mdash;she has failed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wayworth stared.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then how can the play be all
+right?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, we&rsquo;ll save it&mdash;we&rsquo;ll save
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where&rsquo;s Miss Grey&mdash;where <i>is</i>
+she?&rdquo; the young man asked.</p>
+<p>Loder caught his arm as he was turning away again to look for
+his heroine.&nbsp; &ldquo;Never mind her now&mdash;she knows
+it!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wayworth was approached at the same moment by a gentleman he
+knew as one of Mrs. Alsager&rsquo;s friends&mdash;he had
+perceived him in that lady&rsquo;s box.&nbsp; Mrs. Alsager was
+waiting there for the successful author; she desired very
+earnestly that he would come round and speak to her.&nbsp;
+Wayworth assured himself first that Violet had left the
+theatre&mdash;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.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;t have made a
+hit), and this attitude had blighted the pleasant plan, which
+fell to the ground.&nbsp; He had called her morbid, but she was
+immovable.&nbsp; Mrs. Alsager&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Mrs. Alsager had carried him off in
+her brougham&mdash;the other people who were coming got into
+things of their own.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Had she spoilt the play, had she jeopardised or
+compromised it&mdash;had she been utterly bad, had she been good
+in any degree?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly the performance would have seemed better if
+<i>she</i> had been better,&rdquo; Mrs. Alsager confessed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And the play would have seemed better if the
+performance had been better,&rdquo; Wayworth said, gloomily, from
+the corner of the brougham.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She does what she can, and she has talent, and she
+looked lovely.&nbsp; But she doesn&rsquo;t <i>see</i> Nona
+Vincent.&nbsp; She doesn&rsquo;t see the type&mdash;she
+doesn&rsquo;t see the individual&mdash;she doesn&rsquo;t see the
+woman you meant.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s out of it&mdash;she gives you
+a different person.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, the woman I meant!&rdquo; the young man exclaimed,
+looking at the London lamps as he rolled by them.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+wish to God she had known <i>you</i>!&rdquo; he added, as the
+carriage stopped.&nbsp; After they had passed into the house he
+said to his companion:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You see she <i>won&rsquo;t</i> pull me
+through.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Forgive her&mdash;be kind to her!&rdquo; Mrs. Alsager
+pleaded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall only thank her.&nbsp; The play may go to the
+dogs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it does&mdash;if it does,&rdquo; Mrs. Alsager began,
+with her pure eyes on him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, what if it does?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She couldn&rsquo;t tell him, for the rest of her guests came
+in together; she only had time to say: &ldquo;It
+<i>sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t</i> go to the dogs!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; When he got
+into the street, however, he allowed second thoughts to counsel
+another course; the effect of knocking her up at two
+o&rsquo;clock in the morning would hardly be to soothe her.&nbsp;
+He looked at six newspapers the next day and found in them never
+a good word for her.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Wayworth drove early to Notting Hill, but he
+didn&rsquo;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.&nbsp; She declined to see him&mdash;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.&nbsp; Wayworth sat for an
+hour with the old lady, who understood everything and to whom he
+could speak frankly.&nbsp; She gave him a touching picture of her
+niece&rsquo;s condition, which was all the more vivid for the
+simple words in which it was expressed: &ldquo;She feels she
+isn&rsquo;t right, you know&mdash;she feels she isn&rsquo;t
+right!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell her it doesn&rsquo;t matter&mdash;it doesn&rsquo;t
+matter a straw!&rdquo; said Wayworth.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And she&rsquo;s so proud&mdash;you know how proud she
+is!&rdquo; the old lady went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell her I&rsquo;m more than satisfied, that I accept
+her gratefully as she is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She says she injures your play, that she ruins
+it,&rdquo; said his interlocutress.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;ll improve, immensely&mdash;she&rsquo;ll grow
+into the part,&rdquo; the young man continued.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;d improve if she knew how&mdash;but she says
+she doesn&rsquo;t.&nbsp; She has given all she has got, and she
+doesn&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s wanted.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s wanted is simply that she should go
+straight on and trust me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How can she trust you when she feels she&rsquo;s losing
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Losing me?&rdquo; Wayworth cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll never forgive her if your play is taken
+off!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It will run six months,&rdquo; said the author of the
+piece.</p>
+<p>The old lady laid her hand on his arm.&nbsp; &ldquo;What will
+you do for her if it does?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked at Violet Grey&rsquo;s aunt a moment.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Do you say your niece is very proud?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Too proud for her dreadful profession.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then she wouldn&rsquo;t wish you to ask me that,&rdquo;
+Wayworth answered, getting up.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; All his restlessness had
+gone, and fatigue and depression possessed him.&nbsp; He sank
+into his old chair by the fire and sat there for hours with his
+eyes closed.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Yet she was
+more familiar to him than the women he had known best, and she
+was ineffably beautiful and consoling.&nbsp; She filled the poor
+room with her presence, the effect of which was as soothing as
+some odour of incense.&nbsp; She was as quiet as an affectionate
+sister, and there was no surprise in her being there.&nbsp;
+Nothing more real had ever befallen him, and nothing, somehow,
+more reassuring.&nbsp; He felt her hand rest upon his own, and
+all his senses seemed to open to her message.&nbsp; She struck
+him, in the strangest way, both as his creation and as his
+inspirer, and she gave him the happiest consciousness of
+success.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; From time to time she smiled
+and said: &ldquo;I live&mdash;I live&mdash;I live.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+How long she stayed he couldn&rsquo;t have told, but when his
+landlady blundered in with the lamp Nona Vincent was no longer
+there.&nbsp; 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&mdash;the joy of the artist&mdash;in the thought of how
+right he had been, how exactly like herself he had made
+her.&nbsp; She had come to show him that.&nbsp; At the end of
+five minutes, however, he felt sufficiently mystified to call his
+landlady back&mdash;he wanted to ask her a question.&nbsp; When
+the good woman reappeared the question hung fire an instant; then
+it shaped itself as the inquiry:</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Has any lady been here?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, sir&mdash;no lady at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The woman seemed slightly scandalised.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not Miss
+Vincent?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Miss Vincent, sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The young lady of my play, don&rsquo;t you
+know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, sir, you mean Miss Violet Grey!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No I don&rsquo;t, at all.&nbsp; I think I mean Mrs.
+Alsager.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There has been no Mrs. Alsager, sir.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nor anybody at all like her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenly
+taken him.&nbsp; Then she asked in an injured tone: &ldquo;Why
+shouldn&rsquo;t I have told you if you&rsquo;d &rsquo;ad callers,
+sir?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you might have thought I was
+asleep.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with the
+lamp&mdash;and well you&rsquo;d earned it, Mr.
+Wayworth!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;See me to-night in front, and don&rsquo;t come near me
+till it&rsquo;s over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes for
+the evening.&nbsp; He obeyed them to the letter; he watched her
+from the depths of a box.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; She <i>was</i> in it, this time; she had pulled
+herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at
+every turn.&nbsp; Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a
+position to judge, and as he judged he exulted.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+It was as if <i>she</i> had had a revelation of Nona, so
+convincing a clearness had been breathed upon the picture.&nbsp;
+He kept himself quiet in the <i>entr&rsquo;actes</i>&mdash;he
+would speak to her only at the end; but before the play was half
+over the manager burst into his box.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s prodigious, what she&rsquo;s up to!&rdquo;
+cried Mr. Loder, almost more bewildered than gratified.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;She has gone in for a new reading&mdash;a blessed
+somersault in the air!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it quite different?&rdquo; Wayworth asked, sharing
+his mystification.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Different?&nbsp; Hyperion to a satyr!&nbsp; It&rsquo;s
+devilish good, my boy!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s devilish good,&rdquo; said Wayworth,
+&ldquo;and it&rsquo;s in a different key altogether from the key
+of her rehearsal.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll run you six months!&rdquo; the manager
+declared; and he rushed round again to the actress, leaving
+Wayworth with a sense that she had already pulled him
+through.&nbsp; She had with the audience an immense personal
+success.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Her aunt had been in her dressing-room with her,
+and the two ladies appeared together.&nbsp; The girl passed him
+quickly, motioning him to say nothing till they should have got
+out of the place.&nbsp; He saw that she was immensely excited,
+lifted altogether above her common artistic level.&nbsp; The old
+lady said to him: &ldquo;You must come home to supper with us: it
+has been all arranged.&rdquo;&nbsp; They had a brougham, with a
+little third seat, and he got into it with them.&nbsp; It was a
+long time before the actress would speak.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The old lady was hushed to awe, or at
+least to discretion, and Wayworth was happy enough to wait.&nbsp;
+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.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I was better&mdash;I was better,&rdquo; said Violet
+Grey, throwing off her cloak in the little drawing-room.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You were perfection.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll be like that
+every night, won&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She smiled at him.&nbsp; &ldquo;Every night?&nbsp; There can
+scarcely be a miracle every day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean by a miracle?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had a revelation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Wayward stared.&nbsp; &ldquo;At what hour?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The right hour&mdash;this afternoon.&nbsp; Just in time
+to save me&mdash;and to save <i>you</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At five o&rsquo;clock?&nbsp; Do you mean you had a
+visit?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She came to me&mdash;she stayed two hours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Two hours?&nbsp; Nona Vincent?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Alsager.&rdquo;&nbsp; Violet Grey smiled more
+deeply.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the same thing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And how did Mrs. Alsager save you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;By letting me look at her.&nbsp; By letting me hear her
+speak.&nbsp; By letting me know her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And what did she say to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kind things&mdash;encouraging, intelligent
+things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, the dear woman!&rdquo; Wayworth cried.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ought to like her&mdash;she likes <i>you</i>.&nbsp;
+She was just what I wanted,&rdquo; the actress added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean she talked to you about Nona?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She said you thought she was like her.&nbsp; She
+<i>is</i>&mdash;she&rsquo;s exquisite.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s exquisite,&rdquo; Wayworth repeated.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Do you mean she tried to coach you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, no&mdash;she only said she would be so glad if it
+would help me to see her.&nbsp; And I felt it did help me.&nbsp;
+I don&rsquo;t know what took place&mdash;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.&nbsp; Somehow she seemed to
+<i>give</i> it all to me.&nbsp; I took it&mdash;I took it.&nbsp;
+I kept her before me, I drank her in.&nbsp; For the first time,
+in the whole study of the part, I had my model&mdash;I could make
+my copy.&nbsp; All my courage came back to me, and other things
+came that I hadn&rsquo;t felt before.&nbsp; She was
+different&mdash;she was delightful; as I&rsquo;ve said, she was a
+revelation.&nbsp; She kissed me when she went away&mdash;and you
+may guess if I kissed <i>her</i>.&nbsp; We were awfully
+affectionate, but it&rsquo;s <i>you</i> she likes!&rdquo; said
+Violet Grey.</p>
+<p>Wayworth had never been more interested in his life, and he
+had rarely been more mystified.&nbsp; &ldquo;Did she wear vague,
+clear-coloured garments?&rdquo; he asked, after a moment.</p>
+<p>Violet Grey stared, laughed, then bade him go in to
+supper.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>You</i> know how she dresses!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was very well pleased at supper, but he was silent and a
+little solemn.&nbsp; He said he would go to see Mrs. Alsager the
+next day.&nbsp; He did so, but he was told at her door that she
+had returned to Torquay.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; His plays sometimes
+succeed, but his wife is not in them now, nor in any
+others.&nbsp; At these representations Mrs. Alsager continues
+frequently to be present.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NONA VINCENT***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
+***** This file should be named 2717-h.htm or 2717-h.zip******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/7/1/2717
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  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.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+</pre></body>
+</html>
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2c2363
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #2717 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2717)
diff --git a/old/nonav10.txt b/old/nonav10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d74146
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/nonav10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1614 @@
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Nona Vincent, by Henry James**
+#32 in our series by Henry James
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+*It must legally be the first thing seen when opening the book.*
+In fact, our legal advisors said we can't even change margins.
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+Title:  Nona Vincent
+
+Author:  Henry James
+
+July, 2001  [Etext #2717]
+
+
+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Nona Vincent, by Henry James**
+*****This file should be named nonav10.txt or nonav10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, nonav11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, nonav10a.txt
+
+
+This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
+from the 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition.  Proofing was by Nina
+Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
+of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text
+files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly
+from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an
+assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few
+more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we
+don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email.
+
+******
+
+To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser
+to view http://promo.net/pg.  This site lists Etexts by
+author and by title, and includes information about how
+to get involved with Project Gutenberg.  You could also
+download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here.  This
+is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,
+for a more complete list of our various sites.
+
+To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any
+Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror
+sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed
+at http://promo.net/pg).
+
+Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
+
+Example FTP session:
+
+ftp metalab.unc.edu
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext01, etc.
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+***
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+We are planning on making some changes in our donation structure
+in 2000, so you might want to email me, hart@pobox.com beforehand.
+
+
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
+from the 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition.  Proofing was by Nina
+Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.
+
+
+
+
+
+Nona Vincent
+
+by Henry James
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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
+encyclopaedic 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 rechauffe, 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Nona Vincent, by Henry James
+
diff --git a/old/nonav10.zip b/old/nonav10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..401795e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/nonav10.zip