“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The reconciliation of the two women in _Ginistrella_, for instance, which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing is ignoble; I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh, how it bothers me, the shaping of the vase--the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things that Life does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear fellow. It is n’t till one has been watching life for forty years that one finds out half of what she’s up to! Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the _bonnes gens_ rolling up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of the ludicrous which the artist himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t bother about the _bonnes gens_.” Mark Ambient went on, while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife, as interpreted by his remarkable sister. “To sink your shaft deep, and polish the plate through which people look into it--that’s what your work consists of,” I remember remarking. “Ah, polishing one’s plate--that is the torment of execution!” he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive at a surface--if you think a surface necessary--some people don’t, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of, as compared with the one with which I have to content myself. Life is really too short for art--one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard. Firm and bright--firm and bright!--the devilish thing has a way, sometimes, of being bright without being firm. When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are horrible little flabby spots where I have taken the second-best word, because I could n’t for the life of me think of the best. If you knew how stupid I am sometimes! They look to me now like pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!” “That’s very bad--very bad,” I said, as gravely as I could. “Very bad? It’s the highest social offence I know; it ought--it absolutely ought--I’m quite serious--to be capital If I knew I should be hanged else, I should manage to find the best word. The people who could n’t--some of them don’t know it when they see it--would shut their inkstands, and we should n’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”