He went home to his actor's six o'clock dinner, and found a letter from Lady Blount imploring him to come to Southcliff at once. Stella was getting worse day by day. Sir Oliver and she were in despair, Dr. Ransome was at his wits' ends. In a woman's frantic helplessness she adjured him to come and work a miracle. Now, it so happened that on the early afternoon of the next day he had a very important appointment. It was a question of his going into nominal management in the autumn. Suitable pieces, a theatre, and financial backers, obscure but vital elements in theatrical business, had been found, and it was with these last that the morrow's all-important interview was to take place. He turned up the railway time-table, and saw that by leaving London by the first train in the morning, and probably skipping lunch, he could spend a couple of hours in Southcliff and get back in time for his engagement. He telegraphed to Lady Blount, dined, and went to the theatre. For perhaps the first time in his pleasant life he was overwhelmed that evening by the sense of the futility of his work, which every artist, actor, painter, and poet is doomed to feel at times. The painted faces of his colleagues, the vain canvas of the sets, the stereotyped words, gestures, inflections, repeated without variation for more than the two hundredth time, the whole elaborate make-believe of life that at once is, and is not, the theatre,--all this oppressed him, filled him with shame and disgust. It had no meaning. It was an idle show. He had given to inanity a life that might have been devoted to the pursuit of noble ideals. Folks are apt to imagine that, when the pains of the actual world get round about an artist's soul, the supreme moment has arrived for him to deliver himself in immortal utterances. This is untrue. He does n't so deliver himself. On the contrary, he cuts up his canvas, smashes his piano, and kicks his manuscript about the room. What interpretation of life, however celestially inspired, can have the all-annihilating poignancy of life itself? Your poet may write an immortal lyric by the death-bed of his mistress; but it is a proof that he did not care a brass farthing for the lady: he is expressing the grief that he might have felt if he had loved her. For the suffering artist, at grips with the great realities, art is only a trumpery matter. It is only when he is getting, or has got, better, that he composes his masterpieces working ... the world to sympathy With hopes and fears it heeded not. So Herold, instinctively obeying the common law, as all poor humans in one way or another have to do, grew heartsick at the vanity of his calling, and, after a mechanically perfect performance, wondered how an honest man could live such a life of shameless fraud.