n, that you must stand up for art
all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will
refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I
can't endure to have you even seem to give way to Godolphin."

"You must stand it so long as I only seem to do it. He's far more
manageable than I expected him to be. It's quite pathetic how docile he
is, how perfectly ductile! But it won't do to browbeat him when he comes
over here a little out of shape. He's a curious creature," Maxwell went
on with a relish in Godolphin, as material, which his wife suffered with
difficulty. "I wonder if he could ever be got into a play. If he could
he would like nothing better than to play himself, and he would do it to
perfection; only it would be a comic part, and Godolphin's mind is for
the serious drama." Maxwell laughed. "All his artistic instincts are in
solution, and it needs something like a chemical agent to precipitate
them, or to give them any positive character. He's like a woman!"

"Thank you," said Mrs. Maxwell.

"Oh, I mean all sorts of good things by that. He has the sensitiveness
of a woman."

"Is that a good thing? Then I suppose he was so piqued by what I said
about his skirt-dance that he will renounce you."

"Oh, I don't believe he will. I managed to smooth him up after you went
out."

Mrs. Maxwell sighed. "Yes, you are very patient, and if you are patient,
you are good. You are better than I am."

"I don't see the sequence exactly," said Maxwell.

They were both silent, and she seemed to have followed his devious
thought in the same muse, for when he spoke again she did not reproach
him with an equal inconsequence. "I don't know whether I could write a
novel, and, besides, I think the drama is the supreme literary form. It
stands on its own feet. It doesn't have to be pushed along, or pulled
along, as the novel does."

"Yes, of course, it's grand. That's the reason I can't bear to have you
do anything unworthy of it."

"I know, Louise," he said, tenderly, and then again they did not speak
for a little while.

He emerged from their silence, at a point apparently very remote, with a
sigh. "If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really
were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play.
But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity
of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every
kind of man in eve