"You must never become a town girl, Molly, or a West End woman, or a society woman." "I don't know, Dick. Perhaps I must." They went on a little farther. "Molly, I wanted to talk to you about something else, but I must talk about this evening. It's been a very remarkable evening. I am enriched by a kind of stepmother--a stepmother before the event, so to speak, not after--a relationship not in any dictionary. I am the child of a younger Sultana. Who would expect to meet in a London hotel, in the person of a middle-aged millionairess, the elder Sultana?" "Ought one to be sorry for you, Dick? You couldn't have a better stepmother." "Not sorry, exactly. But she recalls the sins of the forefathers. I have always understood that he was that kind of person. My mother, who took it wrathfully, was careful that I should know the kind of person he was. Her history halved the fifth commandment. This good lady takes it tearfully." "She was thinking of her own dead child. For a moment she thought you were her son." "Does one weep for a child four and twenty years after its death? There was more than a dead child in those tears." "It was your playing, then. You never played so well. The violin talked all the time. It made me glow only to think of your birds and breezes and flowers." "I shall call on her to-morrow. She wants to talk about it again. Molly, it's a wonderful thing." "What is a wonderful thing?" For he stopped. "Woman is a wonderful thing. Acting, as you know, my poor Molly, makes real emotion difficult for us, because we are always connecting emotion with its theatrical gesture. When we ought to weep, we begin to think of how we weep." "You talk like a book sometimes, Dick. Where do you get all your wisdom?" "Not from books. Come on tramp with me, and you shall learn where I get it, Molly. All the thoughts worth having come to a man as he walks along the road, especially by night. Books can't tell him anything. I say that we can't help connecting emotion with the stage way of expressing it. This makes us quick to understand emotion when we do see it without the stage directions. Which is odd, but it's true. An actor born is a kind of thought-reader." "What are you driving at, Dick?" "I mean that an actor knows real emotion, just because it isn't like the stage business." "Well, what then?" "I was thinking of that poor pale lady, Molly. It's four and twenty years since her husband deserted her, and she thinks about him still. There isn't room in a woman's heart for more than one lover in a life, that's all." "What then?" "It's the lingering passion that she thinks was extinguished long ago. Poor old Haveril is all very well, but he hasn't the engaging qualities of the light comedian. Good, no doubt, at making money, and without the greater vices; but, Molly, my dear, without the lighter virtues. And these she remembers."