“To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a picture of them with your own body—­your face and hands and voice—­compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to do it, or a pen or a chisel!”

“I know what you mean,” said Alicia.  She had a little flush, and an excited hand among the wine-glasses.  “No, I don’t want any; please don’t bother me!” to the man at her elbow with something in aspic.  “It’s much more direct—­your way.”

“And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned, abiding so originally among the instincts!  Oh, yes! if we are lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents.  The ideal has dignity enough.  They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare’s—­with being unliterary.  You might—­good Heavens!—­as well accuse a painter of not being a musician?  Our business lies behind the words—­they are our mere medium!  Rosalind wasn’t literary—­why should I be?  But don’t indulge me in my shop, if it bores you,” Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that Miss Livingstone was never further from being bored.

“Oh, please go on!  If you only knew,” her lifted eyebrows confessed the tedium of Calcutta small-talk.  “But why do you say you are lightly esteemed?  Surely the public is a touchstone—­and you hold the public in the hollow of your hand!”

Hilda smiled.  “Dear old public!  It does its best for us, doesn’t it?  One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never believing in its treachery in the end.  But I don’t know why I say we are lightly esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all.  I’ve done nothing—­I’ve no right.  In ten years perhaps—­no, five—­I’ll write signed articles for the New Review about modern dramatic tendencies.  Meanwhile you’ll have to consider that the value of my opinions is prospective.”

“But already you have succeeded—­you have made a place.”

“In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg.  I think they remember me in Trichinopoly too, and—­yes, it may be so—­in Manila.  But that wasn’t legitimate drama,” and Hilda smiled again in a way that coloured her unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia’s eyes, in rose and gold.  She waited an instant for these tints to materialise, but Miss Howe’s smile slid discreetly into her wine-glass instead.

“There’s immense picturesqueness in the Philippines,” she went on, her look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way with her hat.  “Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions.  One wonders what America will do with those friars, when she does take hold there.”

“Do you think she is going to?” asked Alicia, vaguely.  It was the merest politeness—­she did not wait for a reply.  With a courageous air which became her charmingly she went on, “Don’t you long to submit yourself to London?  I should.”

“Oh, I must.  I know I must.  It’s in the path of duty and conscience—­it’s not to be put off forever.  But one dreads the chained slavery of London”—­she hesitated before the audacity of adding, “the sordid hundred nights,” but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as if she watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.