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!"