"Do you call it honour?" - his host took him up with an intonation

that often comes back to him. "That's what I want YOU to go in
for. I mean the real thing. This is brummagem."

"Brummagem?" Paul ejaculated while his eyes wandered, by a movement
natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.

"Ah they make it so well to-day - it's wonderfully deceptive!"
Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with

the pity of it. Yet he wasn't afraid to seem to patronise when he
could still so far envy. "Is it deceptive that I find you living

with every appearance of domesticfelicity - blest with a devoted,
accomplished wife, with children whose acquaintance I haven't yet

had the pleasure of making, but who MUST be delightful young
people, from what I know of their parents?"

St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. "It's all
excellent, my dear fellow - heaven forbid I should deny it. I've

made a great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of
it, to use it without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to

make it fructify. I've got a loaf on the shelf; I've got
everything in fact but the great thing."

"The great thing?" Paul kept echoing.
"The sense of having done the best - the sense which is the real

life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having
drawn from his intellectualinstrument the finest music that nature

had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He
either does that or he doesn't - and if he doesn't he isn't worth

speaking of. Therefore, precisely, those who really know DON'T
speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears

most is the incorruptible silence of Fame. I've squared her, you
may say, for my little hour - but what's my little hour? Don't

imagine for a moment," the Master pursued, "that I'm such a cad as
to have brought you down here to abuse or to complain of my wife to

you. She's a woman of distinguished qualities, to whom my
obligations are immense; so that, if you please, we'll say nothing

about her. My boys - my children are all boys - are straight and
strong, thank God, and have no poverty of growth about them, no

penury of needs. I receive periodically the most satisfactory
attestation from Harrow, from Oxford, from Sandhurst - oh we've

done the best for them! - of their eminence as living thriving
consuming organisms."

"It must be delightful to feel that the son of one's loins is at
Sandhurst," Paul remarked enthusiastically.

"It is - it's charming. Oh I'm a patriot!"
The young man then could but have the greater tribute of questions

to pay. "Then what did you mean - the other night at Summersoft -
by saying that children are a curse?"

"My dear youth, on what basis are we talking?" and St. George
dropped upon the sofa at a short distance from him. Sitting a

little sideways he leaned back against the opposite arm with his
hands raised and interlocked behind his head. "On the supposition

that a certain perfection's possible and even desirable - isn't it
so? Well, all I say is that one's children interfere with

perfection. One's wife interferes. Marriage interferes."
"You think then the artist shouldn't marry?"

"He does so at his peril - he does so at his cost."
"Not even when his wife's in sympathy with his work?"

"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 immenseincentive. 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 was talking about and should have shown you he

did, as foreign critics like to show it) were to say to you: 'He's
the one, in this country, whom they consider the most perfect,

isn't he?' Is it success to be the occasion of a young
Englishman's having to stammer as you would have to stammer at such

a moment for old England? No, no; success is to have made people
wriggle to another tune. Do try it!"

Paul continued all gravely to glow. "Try what?"
"Try to do some really good work."

"Oh I want to, heaven knows!"
"Well, you can't do it without sacrifices - don't believe that for

a moment," the Master said. "I've made none. I've had everything.
In other words I've missed everything."

"You've had the full rich masculine human general life, with all
the responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys -

all the domestic and social initiations and complications. They
must be immensely suggestive, immensely amusing," Paul anxiously

submitted.
"Amusing?"

"For a strong man - yes."
"They've given me subjects without number, if that's what you mean;

but they've taken away at the same time the power to use them.
I've touched a thousand things, but which one of them have I turned

into gold? The artist has to do only with that - he knows nothing
of any baser metal. I've led the life of the world, with my wife

and my progeny; the clumsyconventionalexpensive materialised
vulgarised brutalised life of London. We've got everything

handsome, even a carriage - we're perfect Philistines and
prosperous hospitableeminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't

try to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we HAVEN'T
got. It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists - come!" the

Master wound up. "You know as well as you sit there that you'd put
a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"

It struck his listener that the tremendous talk promised by him at
Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a promptitude, a fulness,

with which the latter's young imagination had scarcely reckoned.
His impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with the excitement

of such deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed
indeed with the conflict of his feelings - bewilderment and

recognition and alarm, enjoyment and protest and assent, all
commingled with tenderness (and a kind of shame in the

participation) for the sores and bruises exhibited by so fine a
creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret nursed under his

trappings. The idea of HIS, Paul Overt's, becoming the occasion of
such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time

that his consciousness was in certain directions too much alive not
to swallow - and not intensely to taste - every offered spoonful

of the revelation. It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the
deep waters, to make them surge and break in waves of strange

eloquence. But how couldn't he give out a passionate" target="_blank" title="a.易动情的；易怒的">passionate contradiction
of his host's last extravagance, how couldn't he enumerate to him