You don't, secretly,
approve of yourself, Peyton; and that will be fatal. The truth is that,
while you want this now, in a year, or two years, or five, you'll
demand the other. You think it is going to be different from everything
else in heaven and earth, you're convinced it's going to stay all in
the sky; but it will be on the solid familiar ground. Understand again
--it isn't your plan I'm attacking; but your ability; that and your real
ignorance of Mina Raff.
"If you imagine for an instant that this love will be bigger than her
work, if you suppose that, against her acting, it will last, you are an
idiot for your pains. If I don't know the side of her you do, I have
become fairly familiar with one you haven't dreamed of. She is a
greater actress than people yet recognize, principally because of the
general doubt about moving pictures; but that recognition will come,
and, when it does, you will be swept out of sight.
"No, you haven't the slightest suspicion of what it is about; that side
of her, and it's very nearly the whole woman, is a blank. She admitted
to me that she couldn't understand it herself. But what she is doing is
dragging into her genius what it needs. She loves you now, and tomorrow
she'll love a Belgian violinist, a great engineer, a Spanish prince at
San Sebastian. How will you take sitting in the salon and hearing them
padding around over your head? It's no good your getting mad at me; I
am not blaming Mina Raff; you are.
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