himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one
else. Of course one mustn't worry about the bonnes gens," Mark
Ambient went on while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife as
interpreted by his remarkable sister.

"To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people
look into it--that's what your work consists of," I remember
ingeniously observing.

"Ah polishing one's plate--that's the torment of execution!" he
exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. "The effort to
arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort
necessary--some people don't, happily for them! My dear fellow, if
you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one with
which I've to content myself. Life's really too short for art--one
hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm
and bright is very well to say--the devilish thing has a way
sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough
frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with my
knuckles it doesn't give the right sound. There are horrible sandy
stretches where I've taken the wrong turn because I couldn't for the
life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes!
Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of
beauty!"

"They're very bad, very bad," I said as gravely as I could.

"Very bad? They're the highest social offence I know; it ought--it
absolutely ought; I'm quite serious--to be capital. If I knew I
should be publicly thrashed else I'd manage to find the true word.