In the first place, Mrs. Lambert did not pose as any high-priestess of the drama: she was rather contemptuous of the stage. She thought of it as a way to make an easy living, that was all. Alexandra’s notions about the stage were all associated with Art: Mrs. Lambert’s were confined to figures. She and her manager talked business unexcitedly for an hour every day, never esthetics. She was mildly amused when Alexandra showed her enthusiasm for acting, as she did in that first week. "You’ll get over it, my dear," she said. "It’s not an art, merely a matter of temperament. If acting were creative one could take it seriously, but it isn’t. The author creates; the actor only represents. When I’m acting I often feel like the inside of a moving picture show. It’s all mechanical." "But," said Alexandra, "you weren’t always like that? When you first went on the stage—" "I felt as you do, all emotion and inexperience. Now that I’ve lived and am disillusioned I know that the stage is only a business, and not a very edifying one. The public don’t see that side of it, fortunately. They think only of the amusement it provides. If they would stop there it wouldn’t matter: but they have such a mania for everything theatrical in this country, such a desire to penetrate beyond the footlights, that they quite forget the necessity for a curtain between the make-believe of the stage and themselves. They’re like a child with a toy. They want to see the inside mechanism, and directly they do they suffer the usual disappointment. I never take people ’behind’; if I do I always find they never again want to pay for a seat ’in front.’ We’re only shop-keepers, after all, and shop-keepers don’t invite their customers behind the counter, any more than the customers are in the habit of asking their butcher or their baker to dinner. Somehow you can’t get the public to see things like that. Instead of keeping members of the stage at a distance, treating them like kennel-dogs, they invite them to their houses and pamper them. It makes them more conceited and self-sufficient than they are already. I don’t deny that a few actors and actresses are decently born and bred, indoor dogs, so to speak, knowing their manners; but that’s no reason why the whole pack should be made free of the public’s drawing rooms.... Let us walk up to the cathedral and spend a quiet hour there." The tour had opened in a small cathedral town, and the three hours spent at the theater each night hardly counted in their daily round. They motored about the surrounding country, or read, talked and did needlework in the private sitting room of their quiet hotel. Such a life, placid and yet full of pleasant occupation, was delightful to Alexandra. She found the weekly change from town to town exhilarating, and the journey each Sunday in Mrs. Lambert’s comfortable landaulette a luxurious mode of traveling.