?
Always has had, since Apelles painted. What does it matter if everybody
looks after you when you pass down a street, what they say when you
pass?"

"A malefactor may obtain that sort of flattery. I do not see the charm
of it."

"You are very perverse. Of course I talk of an unsullied fame, not of an
infamous notoriety."

"Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety," said Etoile with a certain
scorn, "and it is dearly bought, perhaps too dearly, by the sacrifice of
the serenity of obscurity, the loss of the peace of private life. Art is
great and precious, but the pursuit of it is sadly embittered when we
have become so the plaything of the public, through it, that the
simplest actions of our lives are chronicled and misconstrued. You do
not believe it, perhaps, but I often envy the women sitting at their
cottage doors, with their little children on their knees; no one talks
of _them_!"

"J'ai tant de gloire, o roi, que j'aspire au fumier!"

said Lady Cardiff. "You are very thankless to Fate, my dear, but I
suppose it is always so."

And Lady Cardiff took refuge in her cigar case, being a woman of too
much experience not to know that it is quite useless to try and make
converts to your opinions; and especially impossible to convince people
dissatisfied with their good fortune that they ought to be charmed with
it.

"It is very curious," she thought when she got into her own carriage,
"really it makes one believe in that odd doctrine of, what is it,
Compensations; but, certainly, people of great talent always are a
little mad. If they're not flightily mad with eccentricity and brandy,
they are morbidly mad with solitude and sentiment. Now she is a great
creature, really a great creature; might have the world at her feet if
she liked; and all she cares for is a big dog, a bunch of roses, and
some artist or poet dead and gone three hundred or three thousand years!
It is very queer. It is just like that extraordinary possession of
Victor Hugo's; with powers that might have sufficed to make ten men
brilliant and comfortable, he must vex and worry about politics that
didn't concern him in the least, and go and live under a skylight in the
middle of the sea. It is very odd. They are never happy; but when they
are unhappy, and if you tell them that Addison could be a great writer,
and yet live comfortably and enjoy the things of this world, they only
tell you contemptuously that Addison had no genius, he had only a