besides, the effect was sometimes
irritating to her adviser, who had to bethink himself a little that she
was no more egotistical than the histrionic conscience required. He
wondered if there were necessarily something vulgar in the histrionic
conscience--something condemned only to feel the tricky, personal
question. Wasn't it better to be perfectly stupid than to have only one
eye open and wear for ever in the great face of the world the expression
of a knowing wink? At the theatre, on the numerous July evenings when
the Comedie Francaise exhibited the repertory by the aid of exponents
determined the more sparse and provincial audience should have a taste
of the tradition, her appreciation was tremendously technical and showed
it was not for nothing she was now in and out of Madame Carre's
innermost counsels. But there were moments when even her very acuteness
seemed to him to drag the matter down, to see it in a small and
superficial sense. What he flattered himself he was trying to do for
her--and through her for the stage of his time, since she was the
instrument, and incontestably a fine one, that had come to his hand--was
precisely to lift it up, make it rare, keep it in the region of
distinction and breadth. However, she was doubtless right and he was
wrong, he eventually reasoned: you could afford to be vague only if you
hadn't a responsibility. He had fine ideas, but she was to act them out,
that is to apply them, and not he; and application was of necessity a
vulgarisation, a smaller thing than theory. If she should some day put
forth the great art it wasn't purely fanciful to forecast for her, the
matter would doubtless be by that fact sufficiently transfigured and it
wouldn't signify that some of the onward steps should have been lame.

This was clear to him on several occasions when she recited or motioned
or even merely looked something for him better than usual; then she
quite carried him away, making him wish to ask no more questions, but
only let her disembroil herself in her own strong fashion. In these
hours she gave him forcibly if fitfully that impression of beauty which
was to be her justification. It was too soon for any general estimate of
her progress; Madame Carre had at last given her a fine understanding as
well as a sore, personal, an almost physical, sense of how bad she was.
She had therefore begun on a new basis, had returned to the alphabet and
the drill. It was a phase of awkwardness,