for keeping
out of England. Shyness is not one of those diseases you can cure by
change of climate.

CARVE. Pardon me. My esteemed employer's shyness is a special shyness.
He's only shy when he has to play the celebrity. So long as people take
him for no one in particular he's quite all right. For instance, he's
never shy with me. But instantly people approach him as the celebrity,
instantly he sees in the eye of the beholder any consciousness of being
in the presence of a toff--then he gets desperately shy, and his one
desire is to be alone at sea or to be buried somewhere deep in the
bosom of the earth. (PASCOE laughs.) What are you laughing at? (CARVE
also laughs.)

PASCOE. Go on, go on. I'm enjoying it.

CARVE. No, but seriously! It's true what I tell you. It amounts almost
to a tragedy in the brilliant career of my esteemed. You see now that
England would be impossible for him as a residence. You see, don't you?

PASCOE. Quite.

CARVE. Why, even on the Continent, in the big towns and the big hotels,
we often travel incognito for safety. It's only in the country districts
that he goes about under his own name.

PASCOE. So that he's really got no friends?

CARVE. None, except a few Italian and Spanish peasants--and me.

PASCOE. Well, well! It's an absolute mania then, this shyness.

CARVE. (Slightly hurt.) Oh, not so bad as that! And then it's only
fair to say he has his moments of great daring--you may say rashness.

PASCOE. All timid people are like that.

CARVE. Are they? (Musing.) We're here now owing to one of his moments
of rashness.

PASCOE. Indeed!

CARVE. Yes. We met an English lady in a village in Andalusia, and--well,
of course, I can't tell you everything--but she flirted with him and he
flirted with her.

PASCOE. Under his own name?

CARVE. Yes. And then he proposed to her. I knew all along it was a
blunder.

PASCOE. (Ironic.) Did you?

CARVE. Yes. She belonged to the aristocracy, and she was one of those
amateur painters that wander about the Continent by themselves--you
know.

PASCOE. And did she accept?

CARVE. Oh yes. They got as far as Madrid together, and then all of a
sudden my esteemed saw that he had made a mistake.

PASCOE. And what then?

CARVE. We fled the country. We hooked it. The idea of coming to London
struck him--just the caprice of a man who's lost his head--and here we
are.

PASCOE. (After a pause.) He doesn't seem to me from the look of him to
be a man