and the life itself was silken ease compared with what it would have been but for Barney Bill’s kidnapping.  It never occurred to him to complain of nubbly bed and ill-cooked steak and crowded and unventilated dressing rooms; but it always struck him as being absurd that such should continue to be the lot of one predestined to greatness.  There was some flaw in the working of destiny.  It puzzled him.

Once indeed, being out, but having an engagement ahead, and waiting for rehearsals to begin, he had found himself sufficiently prosperous to take a third-class ticket to Paris, where he spent a glorious month.  But the prosperity never returned, and he had to live on his memories of Paris.

During these years books were, as ever, his joy and his consolation.  He taught himself French and a little German.  He read history, philosophy, a smattering of science, and interested himself in politics.  So aristocratic a personage naturally had passionate Tory sympathies.  Now and again—­but not often, for the theatrical profession is generally Conservative—­he came across a furious Radical in the company and tasted the joy of fierce argument.  Now and again too, he came across a young woman of high modern cultivation, and once or twice narrowly escaped wrecking his heart on the Scylline rock of her intellect.  It was only when he discovered that she had lost her head over his romantic looks, and not over his genius and his inherited right to leadership, that he began to question her intellectual sincerity.  And there is nothing to send love scuttling away with his quiver between his legs like a note of interrogation of that sort.  The only touch of the morbid in Paul was his resentment at owing anything to his mere personal appearance.  He could not escape the easy chaff of his fellows on his “fatal beauty.”  He dreaded the horrible and hackneyed phrase which every fresh intimacy either with man or woman would inevitably evoke, and he hated it beyond reason.  There was a tour during which he longed for small-pox or a broken nose or facial paralysis, so that no woman should ever look at him again and no man accuse him in vulgar jest.

He played small utility parts and understudied the leading man.  On the rare occasions when he played the lead, he made no great hit.  The company did not, after the generous way of theatre folks, surround him, when the performance was over, with a chorus of congratulation.  The manager would say, “Quite all’ right, my boy, as far as it goes, but still wooden.  You must get more life into it.”  And Paul, who knew himself to be a better man in every way than the actor whose part he was playing, just as in his childhood days he knew himself to be a better man than Billy Goodge, could not understand the general lack of appreciation.  Then he remembered the early struggles of the great actors:  Edmund Kean, who on the eve of his first appearance at Drury Lane cried, “If I succeed I shall go mad!”;