answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.
`Money!' he said. `Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property
of nature in a man to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you
play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start,
you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.'
`But you've got to begin,' said Clifford.
`Oh, quite! You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept
outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't
help it.'
`But could you have made money except by plays?' asked Clifford.
`Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a
writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I've got to be. There's no
question of that.'
`And you think it's a writer of popular plays that you've got to be?'
asked Connie.
`There, exactly!' he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. `There's
nothing in it! There's nothing in popularity. There's nothing in the public,
if it comes to that. There's nothing really in my plays to make them
popular. It's not that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will
have to be...for the time being.'
He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such
fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so
old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him
generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he
was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the
desperate bravery of his rat-like existence.
`At least it's wonderful what you've done at your time of life,' said
Clifford contemplatively.
`I'm thirty...yes, I'm thirty!' said Michaelis, sharply and suddenly,
with a curious laugh; hollow, triumphant, and bitter.
`And are you alone?' asked Connie.
`How do you mean? Do I live alone? I've got my servant. He's a Greek,
so he says, and quite incompetent. But I keep him. And I'm going to marry.
Oh, yes, I must marry.'
`It sounds like going to have your tonsils cut,' laughed Connie. `Will
it be an effort?'
He looked at her admiringly. `Well, Lady Chatterley, somehow it will! I
find... excuse me... I find I can't marry an Englishwoman, not even an
Irishwoman...'
`Try an American,' said Clifford.
`Oh, American!' He laughed a hollow laugh. `No, I've asked my man if he
will find me a Turk or something...something nearer to the Oriental.'
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