She has an impudence, life! If one
risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long
to believe it. You don't know yet, my dear fellow. It is n't till one
has been watching life for forty years that one finds out half of what
she's up to! Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably contain a
mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its
cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the _bonnes gens_
rolling up their eyes at one's cynicism, the situation has elements of
the ludicrous which the artist himself is doubtless in a position to
appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn't bother about
the _bonnes gens_." Mark Ambient went on, while my thoughts reverted to
his ladylike wife, as interpreted by his remarkable sister.

"To sink your shaft deep, and polish the plate through which people look
into it--that's what your work consists of," I remember remarking.

"Ah, polishing one's plate--that is the torment of execution!" he
exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. "The effort to arrive
at a surface--if you think a surface necessary--some people don't,
happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream
of, as compared with the one with which I have to content myself. Life
is really too short for art--one hasn't time to make one's shell ideally
hard. Firm and bright--firm and bright!--the devilish thing has a way,
sometimes, of being bright without being firm. When I rap it with my
knuckles it doesn't give the right sound. There are horrible little
flabby spots where I have taken the second-best word, because I could
n't for the life of me think of the best. If you knew how stupid I am
sometimes! They look to me now like pimples and ulcers on the brow of
beauty!"

"That's very bad--very bad," I said, as gravely as I could.

"Very bad? It's the highest social offence I know; it ought--it
absolutely ought--I'm quite serious--to be capital If I knew I should be
hanged else, I should manage to find the best word. The people who
could n't--some of them don't know it when they see it--would shut their
inkstands, and we should n't be deluged by this flood of rubbish!"

I will not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, or to
explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark
Ambient revealed to me more and more that he looked at all things from
the standpoint of the artist, felt all lif