"Still, you shouldn't generalise too widely," urged the other. "There are plays where one's sensibilities are really touched, where the situations are not forced, where the performers move and speak like living, ordinary human beings, and, in the case of great actors, work upon the feelings of the audience to such an extent----" "And there the artificiality is all the greater!" chipped in Austin, tersely. "The more perfect the illusion, the hollower the artificiality. Of course, no one could take Sardanapalus seriously, any more than if he were a marionette pulled by strings instead of the sort of live marionette he really is. But where the acting and the situations are so perfect, as you say, as to cause real emotion, the unreality of the whole business is more flagrantly conspicuous than ever. The emotions pourtrayed are not real, and nobody pretends they are. The art, therefore, of making them appear real, and even communicating them to the audience, must of necessity involve greater artificiality than where the acting is bad and the situations ridiculous. There's a person I know, near where I live--you never heard of him, of course, but he's called Jock MacTavish--and he told me he once went to see a really very great actress do some part or other in which she had to die a most pathetic death. It was said to be simply heart-rending, and everybody used to cry. Well, the night Jock MacTavish was there something went wrong--a sofa was out of its place, or a bolster had been forgotten, or a rope wouldn't work, I don't know what it was--and the language that woman indulged in while she was in the act of dying would have disgraced a bargee. Jock was in a stage-box and heard every filthy word of it. Of course _he_ told me the story as a joke, and I was rather disgusted, but I'm glad he did so now. That was an extreme case, I know--such things don't occur one time in ten thousand, no doubt--but it's an illustration of what I mean when I say that the finer the illusion produced the hollower the sham that produces it." "You're a mighty subtle-minded young person for your age," exclaimed St Aubyn, with a good-humoured laugh. "I confess that your theory is new to me; it had never occurred to me before. For one who has only been inside a theatre two or three times in his life you seem to have elaborated your conclusions pretty quickly. I may infer, then, that you're not exactly hankering to go on the stage yourself?" "_I_?" said Austin, drawing himself up. "I, disguise myself in paint and feathers to be a public gazing-stock? Of course you mean it as a joke." "And yet there _are_ gentlemen upon the stage," observed St Aubyn, in order to draw him on. "So much the better for the stage, perhaps; so much the worse for the gentlemen," replied Austin haughtily. A pause. They were now well out in the open country, with the moonlit road stretching far in front of them. Then St Aubyn said, in a different tone altogether: