“Worked out!” exclaimed the Earl. “For any one with true dramatic instincts, it is only the Overture that is ended! The real treat has yet to begin. You go to a theatre, and pay your ten shillings for a stall, and what do you get for your money? Perhaps it's a dialogue between a couple of farmers--unnatural in their overdone caricature of farmers' dress--more unnatural in their constrained attitudes and gestures--most unnatural in their attempts at ease and geniality in their talk. Go instead and take a seat in a third-class railway-carriage, and you'll get the same dialogue done to the life! Front-seats--no orchestra to block the view--and nothing to pay!” “Which reminds me,” said Eric. “There is nothing to pay on receiving a telegram! Shall we enquire for one?” And he and Lady Muriel strolled off in the direction of the Telegraph-Office. “I wonder if Shakespeare had that thought in his mind,” I said, “when he wrote 'All the world's a stage'?” The old man sighed. “And so it is,” he said, “look at it as you will. Life is indeed a drama; a drama with but few encores--and no bouquets!” he added dreamily. “We spend one half of it in regretting the things we did in the other half!” “And the secret of enjoying it,” he continued, resuming his cheerful tone, “is intensity!” “But not in the modern aesthetic sense, I presume? Like the young lady, in Punch, who begins a conversation with 'Are you intense?'” “By no means!” replied the Earl. “What I mean is intensity of thought--a concentrated attention. We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life, by not really attending. Take any instance you like: it doesn't matter how trivial the pleasure may be--the principle is the same. Suppose A and B are reading the same second-rate circulating-library novel. A never troubles himself to master the relationships of the characters, on which perhaps all the interest of the story depends: he 'skips' over all the descriptions of scenery, and every passage that looks rather dull: he doesn't half attend to the passages he does read: he goes on reading merely from want of resolution to find another occupation--for hours after he ought to have put the book aside: and reaches the 'FINIS' in a state of utter weariness and depression! B puts his whole soul into the thing--on the principle that 'whatever is worth doing is worth doing well': he masters the genealogies: he calls up pictures before his 'mind's eye' as he reads about the scenery: best of all, he resolutely shuts the book at the end of some chapter, while his interest is yet at its keenest, and turns to other subjects; so that, when next he allows himself an hour at it, it is like a hungry man sitting down to dinner: and, when the book is finished, he returns to the work of his daily life like 'a giant refreshed'!” “But suppose the book were really rubbish--nothing to repay attention?”