"Let me see!--what are we talking about?" For Challis had forgotten. "I believe I'm on a line of self-justification. Didn't I tell you I never succeeded? I believe I'm creeping round to a sneaking apology for having offered you Aminta Torrington at all. I wouldn't have written the part for you--even then. But there it was, and you asked for the chance, and it was the only thing I had to offer." Judith's laugh rang out. She had a capital stage laugh, musical but penetrating. "Nobody's finding fault with you, stupid man! But why 'even then'? It's not four months since. Where is the difference?" She had opened her eyes full on him to laugh at him, and now closed them again to wait for an answer. Had Challis been at his best, observing nature with a view to copy, he would have noticed that last time she laughed--about the sugar-plum's message--she had left her eyes open, full flash on him. But he was too busy with a difficulty to do his duty by human nature, that it behoved him to know, like Peter Ronsard. That unfortunate "even then" that he had blundered out had brought him face to face with a fact that--so it struck him now--he had never felt properly ashamed of. How came it that, up to this moment, he had scarcely seen in it a matter to be ashamed of at all; and now, almost involuntarily, he had drawn a distinction between _now_ and _then_ that seemed to place Judith Arkroyd _then_ on a lower level? It was actually true that three months ago he was trying for all he was worth to negotiate this girl into the good graces of his stage Jupiter; to get her on the boards to represent a woman whose wickedness he had specially invented, thereby to fall into the fashion of a time that he himself accounted an age of stark fools. For he had never come across an Aminta Torrington; but he conceived, for all that, when he put her on the stage, and set Mr. Guppy and Dick Swiveller off being up-to-date about her, that he was performing his part in the dance--the dance of fools! He felt he was in difficulties, and even for a moment contemplated an appeal to the Artist's Love for His Work, as an excuse for his own attempt to get the help of Judith's beauty for his _corps dramatique_. He hesitated, negatived it, and said to himself uncandidly that--thank God!--he had not fallen as low as that. But he never suspected, as this story has begun to do, that his sense of shame was due to the fact that this lady had become less cheap to him in these three months--dangerously less.