Hilda smiled.  “Dear old public!  It does its best for us, doesn’t it?  One loves it, you know, as sailors love the sea, never believing in its treachery in the end.  But I don’t know why I say we are lightly esteemed, or why I dogmatise about it at all.  I’ve done nothing—­I’ve no right.  In ten years perhaps—­no, five—­I’ll write signed articles for the New Review about modern dramatic tendencies.  Meanwhile you’ll have to consider that the value of my opinions is prospective.”

“But already you have succeeded—­you have made a place.”

“In Coolgardie, in Johannesburg, I think they remember me in Trichinopoly too, and—­yes, it may be so—­in Manila.  But that wasn’t legitimate drama,” and Hilda smiled again in a way that coloured her unspoken reminiscence, to Alicia’s eyes, in rose and gold.  She waited an instant for these tints to materialise, but Miss Howe’s smile slid discreetly into her wineglass instead.

“There’s immense picturesqueness in the Philippines,” she went on, her look of thoughtful criticism contrasting in the queerest way with her hat.  “Real ecclesiastical tyranny with pure traditions.  One wonders what America will do with those friars, when she does go there.”

“Do you think she is going?” asked Alicia vaguely.  It was the merest politeness—­she did not wait for a reply.  With a courageous air which became her charmingly, she went on, “Don’t you long to submit yourself to London?  I should.”

“Oh, I must.  I know I must.  It’s in the path of duty and conscience—­it’s not to be put off for ever.  But one dreads the chained slavery of London”—­she hesitated before the audacity of adding, “the sordid hundred nights,” but Alicia divined it, and caught her breath as if she had watched the other woman make a hazardous leap.

“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 byways where one finds the colour of the sun.  The successful London actress, my dear—­what existence 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 for ever 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.”