"I can hire if I'm pushed," said he. "It's hell, isn't it? Something
told me not to go out with a fit-up. We'd never come down to it
before. And I mistrusted Larkins--but we were out six months.
Paul, my boy, chuck it. You're young; you're clever; you've had a
swell education; you come of gentlefolk--my father kept a small
hardware shop in Leicester--you have"--the smitten and generally
inarticulate man hesitated--it well, you have extraordinary
personal beauty; you have charm; you could do anything you like in
the world, save act--and you can't act for toffee. Why the blazes
do you stick to it?"

"I've got to earn my living just like you," said Paul, greatly
flattered by the artless tribute to his aristocratic personality and
not offended by the professional censure which he knew to be just.
"I've tried all sorts of other things-music, painting, poetry,
novel-writing--but none of them has come off."

"Your people don't make you an allowance?"

"I've no people living," said Paul, with a smile--and when Paul
smiled it was as if Eros's feathers had brushed the cheek of a
Praxitelean Hermes; and then with an outburst half sincere, half
braggart--"I've been on my own ever since I was thirteen."

Wilmer regarded him wearily. "The missus and I have always thought
you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth."

"So I was," Paul declared from his innermost conviction. "But," he
laughed, "I lost it before my teeth came and I could get a grip on
it."