sordid hundred nights," but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as
if she had watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.

"You are magnificently sure," she said. Alicia herself felt curiously
buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate
achievement. The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had
become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together,
and regarded each other with absorbent eyes. In Hilda's there was an
instant of consideration before she said--"I might as well tell you--you
won't misunderstand--that I AM sure. I expect things of myself. I hold a
kind of mortgage on my success; when I foreclose it will come, bringing
the long, steady, grasping chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never
a day to live in, only to accomplish, every moment straddled with
calculation, an end to all the byways where one finds the colour of the
sun. The successful London actress, my dear--what existence has she? A
straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights
in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net
result in every newspaper--an existence of pure artificiality infested
by reporters. It's like living in the shell of your personality. It's
the house for ever on your back; at the last you are buried in it,
smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings.
There never was reward so qualified by its conditions."

"Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?"

"Oh yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish! But then
you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but the
eternal strain to keep even with yourself. I don't suppose I could
begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player--they aren't much
understood even in the profession--but there are so many, honestly, that