"She never is--she can't be! Women haven't a conception of such things."

"Surely they on occasion work themselves," Paul objected.

"Yes, very badly indeed. Oh of course, often, they think they
understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is they're most
dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a great
lot of money. Their great nobleness and virtue, their exemplary
conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you up to that. My
wife makes all my bargains with my publishers for me, and has done so for
twenty years. She does it consummately well--that's why I'm really
pretty well off. Aren't you the father of their innocent babes, and will
you withhold from them their natural sustenance? You asked me the other
night if they're not an immense incentive. Of course they are--there's
no doubt of that!"

Paul turned it over: it took, from eyes he had never felt open so wide,
so much looking at. "For myself I've an idea I need incentives."

"Ah well then, n'en parlons plus!" his companion handsomely smiled.

"_You_ are an incentive, I maintain," the young man went on. "You don't
affect me in the way you'd apparently like to. Your great success is
what I see--the pomp of Ennismore Gardens!"

"Success?"--St. George's eyes had a cold fine light. "Do you call it
success to be spoken of as you'd speak of me if you were sitting here
with another artist--a young man intelligent and sincere like yourself?
Do you call it success to make you blush--as you would blush!--if some
foreign critic (some fellow, of course I mean, who should know what he