' Overdo it?' My dear boy it is rather late in the day to recommend me not to overdo it. Besides, we women, and in special this woman, are so much stronger than men. My company follow me through hours of rehearsal, faint yet pursuing. They drop asleep, and I wake them with a gentle touch on their shoulders, and they say, “ Is it morning yet?” And I say, “ Kindly wake up for ten minutes, and go through this scene, dear, and then you shall go to sleep again.” Then, at the end, when I say, “ That is all for to-night, ladies and gentlemen,” they all hurry away in desperate fear lest I should ask them to supper. “ Il faut lutter pour l'art,” as Daudet says. I'm so glad I'm not a prig, Harold, who thinks about the exigencies of the artistic temperament. I'm not an artist at all. People come to see me act because I'm (a) rather good-looking, (b) in rollicking good spirits. What delicious cantaloupe! I like my food.}}
' All the same, I wish you would take more care of yourself,' said he, fostering her present temper with a light and, he hoped, skilful hand. ' I'm sure you do too much, and some day you will break down. You are spending more than your income of nervous energy, you are living on the capital.'
' Just what I mean to do. Like Mr. Carnegie, I think it would be a disgrace to die with an ounce of nervous force left in one. What use is it when one is dead? I am living on the capital; I intend to spend it all. I shall die sooner, no doubt—but, oh, Harold, what an awful old person I should be at sixty if I proposed, which I do not, to live as long. Look at the old women who have spent their youth as I have done. Rouge on their raddled cheeks, clinging to life, mortally afraid of dying, trying to get a few more successes, with one bleary eye anxiously fixed on some back door into heaven, the other roaming round to see if they can't have another little flirtation
