“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The reconciliation of the two women in ‘Natalina,’ for instance, which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing’s 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 worries 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 Life herself, the brazen hussy, 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 youth. It isn’t till one has been watching her some 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 poor reproducer himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t worry 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 ingeniously observing. “Ah polishing one’s plate—that’s the torment of execution!” he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort 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’ve to content myself. Life’s really too short for art—one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say—the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are horrible sandy stretches where I’ve taken the wrong turn because I couldn’t for the life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes! Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!” “They’re very bad, very bad,” I said as gravely as I could.