“You are magnificently sure,” she said.  Alicia herself felt curiously buoyed up and capable, conscious of vague intuitions of immediate achievement.  The lunch-table still lay between the two, but it had become in a manner intangible; the selves of them had drawn together, and regarded each other with absorbent eyes.  In Hilda’s there was an instant of consideration before she said: 

“I might as well tell you—­you won’t misunderstand—­that I am sure.  I expect things of myself.  I hold a kind of mortgage on my success; when I foreclose it will come, bringing the long, steady, grasping chase of money and fame, eyes fixed, never a day to live in, only to accomplish, every moment straddled with calculation, an end to all the byeways where one finds the colour of the sun.  The successful London actress, my dear—­what excursion has she?  A straight flight across the Atlantic in a record-breaker, so many nights in New York, so many in Chicago, so many in a Pullman car, and the net result in every newspaper—­an existence of pure artificiality infested by reporters.  It’s like living in the shell of your personality.  It’s the house forever on your back; at the last you are buried in it, smirking in your coffin with a half-open eye on the floral offerings.  There never was reward so qualified by its conditions.”

“Surely there would be some moments of splendid compensation?”

“Oh, yes; and for those in the end we are all willing to perish!  But then you know all, you have done all; there is nothing afterwards but the eternal strain to keep even with yourself.  I don’t suppose I could begin to make you see the joys of a strolling player—­they aren’t much understood in the proscenium—­but there are so many, honestly, that London being at the top of the hill, I’m not panting up.  My way of going has twice wound round the world already.  But I’m talking like an illustrated interview.  You will grant the impertinence of all I’ve been saying when I tell you that I’ve never yet had an illustrated interview.”

“Aren’t they almost always vulgar?” Alicia asked.  “Don’t they make you sit the wrong way on a chair, in tights?”

Hilda threw her head back and laughed almost, Alicia noted, like a man.  She certainly did not hide her mouth with her hands or her handkerchief, as woman often do in bursts of hilarity; she laughed freely, and as much as she wanted to, and it was as clear as possible that tights presented themselves quite preposterously to any discussion of her profession.  They were things to be taken for granted, like the curtain and the wings; they had no relation to clothing in the world.

Alicia laughed too.  After all, they were absurd—­her outsider’s prejudices.  She said something like that, and Hilda seemed to soar again for her point of view about the illustrated interviews.  “They are atrocities,” she said.  “On their merits they ought to be cast out of even the suburbs of art and literature.  But they help to make the atmosphere that gives us power to work, and if they do that, of course”——­the pursed seriousness of her lips gave Alicia the impression that, though the whole world took offence, the expediency of the illustrated interview was beyond discussion.