She pleased him as a charming creature--by her sincerities and her
perversities, by the varieties and surprises of her character and by
certain happy facts of her person. In private her eyes were sad to
him and her voice was rare. He detested the idea that she should
have a disappointment or an humiliation, and he wanted to rescue her
altogether, to save and transplant her. One way to save her was to
see to it, to the best of his ability, that the production of his
play should be a triumph; and the other way--it was really too queer
to express--was almost to wish that it shouldn't be. Then, for the
future, there would be safety and peace, and not the peace of death--
the peace of a different life. It is to be added that our young man
clung to the former of these ways in proportion as the latter
perversely tempted him. He was nervous at the best, increasingly and
intolerably nervous; but the immediate remedy was to rehearse harder
and harder, and above all to work it out with Violet Grey. Some of
her comrades reproached him with working it out only with her, as if
she were the whole affair; to which he replied that they could afford
to be neglected, they were all so tremendously good.
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