This answer of the hope of the Dormers drew the eyes of his mother and sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he wasn't used to such responsibilities--so few people had ever tested his presence of mind by agreeing with him. "Oh I used to be of your way of feeling," Nash went on to Sherringham. "I understand you perfectly. It's a phase like another. I've been through it--_j'ai ete comme ca._" "And you went then very often to the Theatre Francais, and it was there I saw you. I place you now." "I'm afraid I noticed none of the other spectators," Nash explained. "I had no attention but for the great Carre--she was still on the stage. Judge of my infatuation, and how I can allow for yours, when I tell you that I sought her acquaintance, that I couldn't rest till I had told her how I hung upon her lips." "That's just what _I_ told her," Sherringham returned. "She was very kind to me. She said: '_Vous me rendez des forces_.'" "That's just what she said to me!" "And we've remained very good friends." "So have we!" laughed Sherringham. "And such perfect art as hers--do you mean to say you don't consider _that_ important, such a rare dramatic intelligence?" "I'm afraid you read the _feuilletons_. You catch their phrases"--Nash spoke with pity. "Dramatic intelligence is never rare; nothing's more common." "Then why have we so many shocking actors?" "Have we? I thought they were mostly good; succeeding more easily and more completely in that business than in anything else. What could they do--those people generally--if they didn't do that poor thing? And reflect that the poor thing enables them to succeed! Of course, always, there are numbers of people on the stage who are no actors at all, for it's even easier to our poor humanity to be ineffectively stupid and vulgar than to bring down the house." "It's not easy, by what I can see, to produce, completely, any artistic effect," Sherringham declared; "and those the actor produces are among the most momentous we know. You'll not persuade me that to watch such an actress as Madame Carre wasn't an education of the taste, an enlargement of one's knowledge." "She did what she could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coarsening conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character in a play--not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of modern pieces--is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is restricted to so poor an analysis." "I know the complaint. It's all the fashion now. The _raffines_ despise the theatre," said Peter Sherringham in the manner of a man abreast with the culture of his age and not to be captured by a surprise. "_Connu, connu_!"