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Night after night of
concentrated attention to the conventional attitudes and intonation of the
English stage was gradually affecting my speech and carriage. I was giving
way to the infection of sympathetic imitation. Night after night my
plastic nervous system took the print of some new amazing gesture, some
new emotional exaggeration--and retained it. A kind of theatrical veneer
threatened to plate over and obliterate my private individuality
altogether. I saw myself in a kind of vision. Sitting by myself one night,
my new self seemed to me to glide, posing and gesticulating, across the
room. He clutched his throat, he opened his fingers, he opened his legs in
walking like a high-class marionette. He went from attitude to attitude.
He might have been clockwork. Directly after this I made an ineffectual
attempt to resign my theatrical work. But Barnaby persisted in talking
about the Polywhiddle Divorce all the time I was with him, and I could get
no opportunity of saying what I wished.


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