XLIII

"Come on boldly, my dear," said Nick. "Peter's bored to death waiting for you."

"Ah he's come to say he won't dine with us to-night!" Biddy stood with her hand on the latch.

"I leave town to-morrow: I've everything to do; I'm broken-hearted; it's impossible"—Peter made of it again such a case as he could. "Please make my peace with your mother—I'm ashamed of not having written to her last night."

She closed the door and came in while her brother said to her, "How in the world did you guess it?"

"I saw it in the Morning Post." And she kept her eyes on their kinsman.

"In the Morning Post?" he vaguely echoed.

"I saw there's to be a first night at that theatre, the one you took us to. So I said, 'Oh he'll go there.'"

"Yes, I've got to do that too," Peter admitted.

"She's going to sit to me again this morning, his wonderful actress—she has made an appointment: so you see I'm getting on," Nick pursued to his sister.

"Oh I'm so glad—she's so splendid!" The girl looked away from her cousin now, but not, though it seemed to fill the place, at the triumphant portrait of Miriam Rooth.

"I'm delighted you've come in. I have waited for you," Peter hastened to declare to her, though conscious that this was in the conditions meagre.

"Aren't you coming to see us again?"

"I'm in despair, but I shall really not have time. Therefore it's a blessing not to have missed you here."

"I'm very glad," said Biddy. Then she added: "And you're going to America—to stay a long time?"

"Till I'm sent to some better place."

"And will that better place be as far away?"

"Oh Biddy, it wouldn't be better then," said Peter.

"Do you mean they'll give you something to do at home?"

"Hardly that. But I've a tremendous lot to do at home to-day." For the twentieth time Peter referred to his watch.

She turned to her brother, who had admonished her that she might bid him good-morning. She kissed him and he asked what the news would be in Calcutta Gardens; to which she made answer: "The only news is of course the great preparations they're making, poor dears, for Peter. Mamma thinks you must have had such a nasty dinner the other day," the girl continued to the guest of that romantic occasion.

"Faithless Peter!" said Nick, beginning to whistle and to arrange a canvas in anticipation of Miriam's arrival.

"Dear Biddy, thank your stars you're not in my horrid profession," protested the personage so designated. "One's bowled about like a cricket-ball, unable to answer for one's freedom or one's comfort from one moment to another."

"Oh ours is the true profession—Biddy's and mine," Nick broke out, setting up his canvas; "the career of liberty and peace, of charming long mornings spent in a still north light and in the contemplation, I may even say in the company, of the amiable and the beautiful."

"That certainty's the case when Biddy comes to see you," Peter returned.

Biddy smiled at him. "I come every day. Anch'io son pittore! I encourage Nick awfully."

"It's a pity I'm not a martyr—she'd bravely perish with me," Nick said.

"You are—you're a martyr—when people say such odious things!" the girl cried. "They do say them. I've heard many more than I've repeated to you."

"It's you yourself then, indignant and loyal, who are the martyr," observed Peter, who wanted greatly to be kind to her.

"Oh I don't care!"—but she threw herself, flushed and charming, into a straight appeal to him. "Don't you think one can do as much good by painting great works of art as by—as by what papa used to do? Don't you think art's necessary to the happiness, to the greatness of a people? Don't you think it's manly and honourable? Do you think a passion for it's a thing to be ashamed of? Don't you think the artist—the conscientious, the serious one—is as distinguished a member of society as any one else?"

Peter and Nick looked at each other and laughed at the way she had got up her subject, and Nick asked their kinsman if she didn't express it all in perfection. "I delight in general in artists, but I delight still more in their defenders," Peter made reply, perhaps a little meagrely, to Biddy.

"Ah don't attack me if you're wise!" Nick said.

"One's tempted to when it makes Biddy so fine."

"Well, that's the way she encourages me: it's meat and drink to me," Nick went on. "At the same time I'm bound to say there's a little whistling in the dark in it."

"In the dark?" his sister demanded.

"The obscurity, my dear child, of your own aspirations, your mysterious ambitions and esthetic views. Aren't there some heavyish shadows there?"

"Why I never cared for politics."

"No, but you cared for life, you cared for society, and you've chosen the path of solitude and concentration."

"You horrid boy!" said Biddy.

"Give it up, that arduous steep—give it up and come out with me," Peter interposed.

"Come out with you?"

"Let us walk a little or even drive a little. Let us at any rate talk a little."

"I thought you had so much to do," Biddy candidly objected.

"So I have, but why shouldn't you do a part of it with me? Would there be any harm? I'm going to some tiresome shops—you'll cheer the frugal hour."

The girl hesitated, then turned to Nick. "Would there be any harm?"

"Oh it's none of his business!" Peter protested.

"He had better take you home to your mother."

"I'm going home—I shan't stay here to-day," Biddy went on. Then to Peter: "I came in a hansom, but I shall walk back. Come that way with me."

"With pleasure. But I shall not be able to go in," Peter added.

"Oh that's no matter," said the girl. "Good-bye, Nick."

"You understand then that we dine together—at seven sharp. Wouldn't a club, as I say, be best?" Peter, before going, inquired of Nick. He suggested further which club it should be; and his words led Biddy, who had directed her steps toward the door, to turn a moment as with a reproachful question—whether it was for this Peter had given up Calcutta Gardens. But her impulse, if impulse it was, had no sequel save so far as it was a sequel that Peter freely explained to her, after Nick had assented to his conditions, that her brother too had a desire to go to Miss Rooth's first night and had already promised to accompany him.

"Oh that's perfect; it will be so good for him—won't it?—if he's going to paint her again," Biddy responded.

"I think there's nothing so good for him as that he happens to have such a sister as you," Peter declared as they went out. He heard at the same time the sound of a carriage stopping, and before Biddy, who was in front of him, opened the door of the house had been able to say to himself, "What a bore—there's Miriam!" The opened door showed him that truth—this young lady in the act of alighting from the brougham provided by Basil Dashwood's thrifty zeal. Her mother followed her, and both the new visitors exclaimed and rejoiced, in their demonstrative way, as their eyes fell on their valued friend. The door had closed behind Peter, but he instantly and violently rang, so that they should be admitted with as little delay as possible, while he stood disconcerted, and fearing he showed it, by the prompt occurrence of an encounter he had particularly sought to avert. It ministered, moreover, a little to this sensibility that Miriam appeared to have come somewhat before her time. The incident promised, however, to pass off in a fine florid way. Before he knew it both the ladies had taken possession of Biddy, who looked at them with comparative coldness, tempered indeed by a faint glow of apprehension, and Miriam had broken out:

"We know you, we know you; we saw you in Paris, and you came to my theatre a short time ago with Mr. Sherringham!"

"We know your mother, Lady Agnes Dormer. I hope her ladyship's very well," said Mrs. Rooth, who had never struck Peter as a more objectionable old woman.

"You offered to do a head of me or something or other: didn't you tell me you work in clay? I daresay you've forgotten all about it, but I should be delighted," Miriam pursued with the richest urbanity. Peter was not concerned with her mother's pervasiveness, though he didn't like Biddy to see even that; but he hoped his companion would take the overcharged benevolence of the young actress in the spirit in which, rather to his surprise, it evidently was offered. "I've sat to your clever brother many times," said Miriam; "I'm going to sit again. I daresay you've seen what we've done—he's too delightful. Si vous saviez comme cela me repose!" she added, turning for a moment to Peter. Then she continued, smiling at Biddy; "Only he oughtn't to have thrown up such prospects, you know. I've an idea I wasn't nice to you that day in Paris—I was nervous and scared and perverse. I remember perfectly; I was odious. But I'm better now—you'd see if you were to know me. I'm not a bad sort—really I'm not. But you must have your own friends. Happy they—you look so charming! Immensely like Mr. Dormer, especially about the eyes; isn't she, mamma?"

"She comes of a beautiful Norman race—the finest, purest strain," the old woman simpered. "Mr. Dormer's sometimes so good as to come and see us—we're always at home on Sunday; and if some day you found courage to come with him you might perhaps find it pleasant, though very different of course from the circle in which you habitually move."

Biddy murmured a vague recognition of these wonderful civilities, and Miriam commented: "Different, yes; but we're all right, you know. Do come," she added. Then turning to Sherringham: "Remember what I told you—I don't expect you to-night."

"Oh I understand; I shall come,"—and Peter knew he grew red.

"It will be idiotic. Keep him, keep him away—don't let him," Miriam insisted to Biddy; with which, as Nick's portals now were gaping, she drew her mother away.

Peter, at this, walked off briskly with Biddy, dropping as he did so: "She's too fantastic!"

"Yes, but so tremendously good-looking. I shall ask Nick to take me there," the girl said after a moment.

"Well, she'll do you no harm. They're all right, as she says. It's the world of art—you were standing up so for art just now."

"Oh I wasn't thinking so much of that kind," she demurred.

"There's only one kind—it's all the same thing. If one sort's good the other is."

Biddy walked along a moment. "Is she serious? Is she conscientious?"

"She has the makings of a great artist," Peter opined.

"I'm glad to hear you think a woman can be one."

"In that line there has never been any doubt about it."

"And only in that line?"

"I mean on the stage in general, dramatic or lyric. It's as the actress that the woman produces the most complete and satisfactory artistic results."

"And only as the actress?"

He weighed it. "Yes, there's another art in which she's not bad."

"Which one do you mean?" asked Biddy.

"That of being charming and good, that of being indispensable to man."

"Oh that isn't an art."

"Then you leave her only the stage. Take it if you like in the widest sense."

Biddy appeared to reflect a moment, as to judge what sense this might be. But she found none that was wide enough, for she cried the next minute: "Do you mean to say there's nothing for a woman but to be an actress?"

"Never in my life. I only say that that's the best thing for a woman to be who finds herself irresistibly carried into the practice of the arts; for there her capacity for them has most application and her incapacity for them least. But at the same time I strongly recommend her not to be an artist if she can possibly help it. It's a devil of a life."

"Oh I know; men want women not to be anything."

"It's a poor little refuge they try to take from the overwhelming consciousness that you're in very fact everything."

"Everything?" And the girl gave a toss. "That's the kind of thing you say to keep us quiet."

"Dear Biddy, you see how well we succeed!" laughed Peter.

To which she replied by asking irrelevantly: "Why is it so necessary for you to go to the theatre to-night if Miss Rooth doesn't want you to?"

"My dear child, she does want me to. But that has nothing to do with it."

"Why then did she say that she doesn't?"

"Oh because she meant just the contrary."

"Is she so false then—is she so vulgar?"

"She speaks a special language; practically it isn't false, because it renders her thought and those who know her understand it."

"But she doesn't use it only to those who know her," Biddy returned, "since she asked me, who have so little the honour of her acquaintance, to keep you away to-night. How am I to know that she meant by that that I'm to urge you on to go?"

He was on the point of replying, "Because you've my word for it"; but he shrank in fact from giving his word—he had some fine scruples—and sought to relieve his embarrassment by a general tribute. "Dear Biddy, you're delightfully acute: you're quite as clever as Miss Rooth." He felt, however, that this was scarcely adequate and he continued: "The truth is that its being important for me to go is a matter quite independent of that young lady's wishing it or not wishing it. There happens to be a definite intrinsic propriety in it which determines the thing and which it would take me long to explain."

"I see. But fancy your 'explaining' to me: you make me feel so indiscreet!" the girl cried quickly—an exclamation which touched him because he was not aware that, quick as it had been, she had still had time to be struck first—though she wouldn't for the world have expressed it—with the oddity of such a duty at such a season. In fact that oddity, during a silence of some minutes, came back to Peter himself: the note had been forced—it sounded almost ignobly frivolous from a man on the eve of proceeding to a high diplomatic post. The effect of this, none the less, was not to make him break out with "Hang it, I will keep my engagement to your mother!" but to fill him with the wish to shorten his present strain by taking Biddy the rest of the way in a cab. He was uncomfortable, and there were hansoms about that he looked at wistfully. While he was so occupied his companion took up the talk by an abrupt appeal.

"Why did she say that Nick oughtn't to have resigned his seat?"

"Oh I don't know. It struck her so. It doesn't matter much."

But Biddy kept it up. "If she's an artist herself why doesn't she like people to go in for art, especially when Nick has given his time to painting her so beautifully? Why does she come there so often if she disapproves of what he has done?"

"Oh Miriam's disapproval—it doesn't count; it's a manner of speaking."

"Of speaking untruths, do you mean? Does she think just the reverse—is that the way she talks about everything?"

"We always admire most what we can do least," Peter brought forth; "and Miriam of course isn't political. She ranks painters more or less with her own profession, about which already, new as she is to it, she has no illusions. They're all artists; it's the same general sort of thing. She prefers men of the world—men of action."

"Is that the reason she likes you?" Biddy mildly mocked.

"Ah she doesn't like me—couldn't you see it?"

The girl at first said nothing; then she asked: "Is that why she lets you call her 'Miriam'?"

"Oh I don't, to her face."

"Ah only to mine!" laughed Biddy.

"One says that as one says 'Rachel' of her great predecessor."

"Except that she isn't so great, quite yet, is she?"

"Far from it; she's the freshest of novices—she has scarcely been four months on the stage. But no novice has ever been such an adept. She'll go very fast," Peter pursued, "and I daresay that before long she'll be magnificent."

"What a pity you'll not see that!" Biddy sighed after a pause.

"Not see it?"

"If you're thousands of miles away."

"It is a pity," Peter said; "and since you mention it I don't mind frankly telling you—throwing myself on your mercy, as it were—that that's why I make such a point of a rare occasion like to-night. I've a weakness for the drama that, as you perhaps know, I've never concealed, and this impression will probably have to last me in some barren spot for many, many years."

"I understand—I understand. I hope therefore it will be charming." And the girl walked faster.

"Just as some other charming impressions will have to last," Peter added, conscious of keeping up with her by some effort. She seemed almost to be running away from him, an impression that led him to suggest, after they had proceeded a little further without more words, that if she were in a hurry they had perhaps better take a cab. Her face was strange and touching to him as she turned it to make answer:

"Oh I'm not in the least in a hurry and I really think I had better walk."

"We'll walk then by all means!" Peter said with slightly exaggerated gaiety; in pursuance of which they went on a hundred yards. Biddy kept the same pace; yet it was scarcely a surprise to him that she should suddenly stop with the exclamation:

"After all, though I'm not in a hurry I'm tired! I had better have a cab; please call that one," she added, looking about her.

They were in a straight, blank, ugly street, where the small, cheap, grey-faced houses had no expression save that of a rueful, unconsoled acknowledgment of the universal want of identity. They would have constituted a "terrace" if they could, but they had dolefully given it up. Even a hansom that loitered across the end of the vista turned a sceptical back upon it, so that Sherringham had to lift his voice in a loud appeal. He stood with Biddy watching the cab approach them. "This is one of the charming things you'll remember," she said, turning her eyes to the general dreariness from the particular figure of the vehicle, which was antiquated and clumsy. Before he could reply she had lightly stepped into the cab; but as he answered, "Most assuredly it is," and prepared to follow her she quickly closed the apron.

"I must go alone; you've lots of things to do—it's all right"; and through the aperture in the roof she gave the driver her address. She had spoken with decision, and Peter fully felt now that she wished to get away from him. Her eyes betrayed it, as well as her voice, in a look, a strange, wandering ray that as he stood there with his hand on the cab he had time to take from her. "Good-bye, Peter," she smiled; and as the thing began to rumble away he uttered the same tepid, ridiculous farewell.



XLIV

At the entrance of Miriam and her mother Nick, in the studio, had stopped whistling, but he was still gay enough to receive them with every appearance of warmth. He thought it a poor place, ungarnished, untapestried, a bare, almost grim workshop, with all its revelations and honours still to come. But his visitors smiled on it a good deal in the same way in which they had smiled on Bridget Dormer when they met her at the door: Mrs. Rooth because vague, prudent approbation was the habit of her foolish face—it was ever the least danger; and Miriam because, as seemed, she was genuinely glad to find herself within the walls of which she spoke now as her asylum. She broke out in this strain to her host almost as soon as she had crossed the threshold, commending his circumstances, his conditions of work, as infinitely happier than her own. He was quiet, independent, absolute, free to do what he liked as he liked it, shut up in his little temple with his altar and his divinity; not hustled about in a mob of people, having to posture and grin to pit and gallery, to square himself at every step with insufferable conventions and with the ignorance and vanity of others. He was blissfully alone.

"Mercy, how you do abuse your fine profession! I'm sure I never urged you to adopt it!" Mrs. Rooth cried, in real bewilderment, to her daughter.

"She was abusing mine still more the other day," joked Nick—"telling me I ought to be ashamed of it and of myself."

"Oh I never know from one moment to the other—I live with my heart in my mouth," sighed the old woman.

"Aren't you quiet about the great thing—about my personal behaviour?" Miriam smiled. "My improprieties are all of the mind."

"I don't know what you call your personal behaviour," her mother objected.

"You would very soon if it were not what it is."

"And I don't know why you should wish to have it thought you've a wicked mind," Mrs. Rooth agreeably grumbled.

"Yes, but I don't see very well how I can make you understand that. At any rate," Miriam pursued with her grand eyes on Nick, "I retract what I said the other day about Mr. Dormer. I've no wish to quarrel with him on the way he has determined to dispose of his life, because after all it does suit me very well. It rests me, this little devoted corner; oh it rests me! It's out of the row and the dust, it's deliciously still and they can't get at me. Ah when art's like this, a la bonne heure!" And she looked round on such a presentment of "art" in a splendid way that produced amusement on the young man's part at its contrast with the humble fact. Miriam shone upon him as if she liked to be the cause of his mirth and went on appealing to him: "You'll always let me come here for an hour, won't you, to take breath—to let the whirlwind pass? You needn't trouble yourself about me; I don't mean to impose on you in the least the necessity of painting me, though if that's a manner of helping you to get on you may be sure it will always be open to you. Do what you like with me in that respect; only let me sit here on a high stool, keeping well out of your way, and see what you happen to be doing. I'll tell you my own adventures when you want to hear them."

"The fewer adventures you have to tell the better, my dear," said Mrs. Rooth; "and if Mr. Dormer keeps you quiet he'll add ten years to my life."

"It all makes an interesting comment on Mr. Dormer's own quietness, on his independence and sweet solitude," Nick observed. "Miss Rooth has to work with others, which is after all only what Mr. Dormer has to do when he works with Miss Rooth. What do you make of the inevitable sitter?"

"Oh," answered Miriam, "you can say to the inevitable sitter, 'Hold your tongue, you brute!'"

"Isn't it a good deal in that manner that I've heard you address your comrades at the theatre?" Mrs. Rooth inquired. "That's why my heart's in my mouth."

"Yes, but they hit me back; they reply to me—comme de raison—as I should never think of replying to Mr. Dormer. It's a great advantage to him that when he's peremptory with his model it only makes her better, adds to her expression of gloomy grandeur."

"We did the gloomy grandeur in the other picture: suppose therefore we try something different in this," Nick threw off.

"It is serious, it is grand," murmured Mrs. Rooth, who had taken up a rapt attitude before the portrait of her daughter. "It makes one wonder what she's thinking of. Beautiful, commendable things—that's what it seems to say."

"What can I be thinking of but the tremendous wisdom of my mother?" Miriam returned. "I brought her this morning to see that thing—she had only seen it in its earliest stage—and not to presume to advise you about anything else you may be so good as to embark on. She wanted, or professed she wanted, terribly to know what you had finally arrived at. She was too impatient to wait till you should send it home."

"Ah send it home—send it home; let us have it always with us!" Mrs. Rooth engagingly said. "It will keep us up, up, and up on the heights, near the stars—be always for us a symbol and a reminder!"

"You see I was right," Miriam went on; "for she appreciates thoroughly, in her own way, and almost understands. But if she worries or distracts you I'll send her directly home—I've kept the carriage there on purpose. I must add that I don't feel quite safe to-day in letting her out of my sight. She's liable to make dashes at the theatre and play unconscionable tricks there. I shall never again accuse mamma of a want of interest in my profession. Her interest to-day exceeds even my own. She's all over the place and she has ideas—ah but ideas! She's capable of turning up at the theatre at five o'clock this afternoon to demand the repainting of the set in the third act. For myself I've not a word more to say on the subject—I've accepted every danger, I've swallowed my fate. Everything's no doubt wrong, but nothing can possibly be right. Let us eat and drink, for to-night we die. If you say so mamma shall go and sit in the carriage, and as there's no means of fastening the doors (is there?) your servant shall keep guard over her."

"Just as you are now—be so good as to remain so; sitting just that way—leaning back with a smile in your eyes and one hand on the sofa beside you and supporting you a little. I shall stick a flower into the other hand—let it lie in your lap just as it is. Keep that thing on your head—it's admirably uncovered: do you call such an unconsidered trifle a bonnet?—and let your head fall back a little. There it is—it's found. This time I shall really do something, and it will be as different as you like from that other crazy job. Here we go!" It was in these irrelevant but earnest words that Nick responded to his sitter's uttered vagaries, of which her charming tone and countenance diminished the superficial acerbity. He held up his hands a moment, to fix her in her limits, and in a few minutes had a happy sense of having begun to work.

"The smile in her eyes—don't forget the smile in her eyes!" Mrs. Rooth softly chanted, turning away and creeping about the room. "That will make it so different from the other picture and show the two sides of her genius, the wonderful range between them. They'll be splendid mates, and though I daresay I shall strike you as greedy you must let me hope you'll send this one home too."

She explored the place discreetly and on tiptoe, talking twaddle as she went and bending her head and her eyeglass over various objects with an air of imperfect comprehension that didn't prevent Nick's private recall of the story of her underhand, commercial habits told by Gabriel Nash at the exhibition in Paris the first time her name had fallen on his ear. A queer old woman from whom, if you approached her in the right way, you could buy old pots—it was in this character that she had originally been introduced to him. He had lost sight of it afterwards, but it revived again as his observant eyes, at the same time that they followed his active hand, became aware of her instinctive, appraising gestures. There was a moment when he frankly laughed out—there was so little in his poor studio to appraise. Mrs. Rooth's wandering eyeglass and vague, polite, disappointed, bent back and head made a subject for a sketch on the instant: they gave such a sudden pictorial glimpse of the element of race. He found himself seeing the immemorial Jewess in her hold up a candle in a crammed back shop. There was no candle indeed and his studio was not crammed, and it had never occurred to him before that she was a grand-daughter of Israel save on the general theory, so stoutly held by several clever people, that few of us are not under suspicion. The late Rudolf Roth had at least been, and his daughter was visibly her father's child; so that, flanked by such a pair, good Semitic presumptions sufficiently crowned the mother. Receiving Miriam's sharp, satiric shower without shaking her shoulders she might at any rate have been the descendant of a tribe long persecuted. Her blandness was beyond all baiting; she professed she could be as still as a mouse. Miriam, on the other side of the room, in the tranquil beauty of her attitude—"found" indeed, as Nick had said—watched her a little and then declared she had best have been locked up at home. Putting aside her free account of the dangers to which her mother exposed her, it wasn't whimsical to imagine that within the limits of that repose from which the Neville-Nugents never wholly departed the elder lady might indeed be a trifle fidgety and have something on her mind. Nick presently mentioned that it wouldn't be possible for him to "send home" his second performance; and he added, in the exuberance of having already got a little into relation with his work, that perhaps this didn't matter, inasmuch as—if Miriam would give him his time, to say nothing of her own—a third and a fourth masterpiece might also some day very well struggle into the light. His model rose to this without conditions, assuring him he might count upon her till she grew too old and too ugly and that nothing would make her so happy as that he should paint her as often as Romney had painted the celebrated Lady Hamilton. "Ah Lady Hamilton!" deprecated Mrs. Rooth; while Miriam, who had on occasion the candour of a fine acquisitiveness, wished to know what particular reason there might be for his not letting them have the picture he was now beginning.

"Why I've promised it to Peter Sherringham—he has offered me money for it," Nick replied. "However, he's welcome to it for nothing, poor chap, and I shall be delighted to do the best I can for him."

Mrs. Rooth, still prowling, stopped in the middle of the room at this, while her daughter echoed: "He offered you money—just as we came in?"

"You met him then at the door with my sister? I supposed you had—he's taking her home," Nick explained.

"Your sister's a lovely girl—such an aristocratic type!" breathed Mrs. Rooth. Then she added: "I've a tremendous confession to make to you."

"Mamma's confessions have to be tremendous to correspond with her crimes," said Miriam. "She asked Miss Dormer to come and see us, suggested even that you might bring her some Sunday. I don't like the way mamma does such things—too much humility, too many simagrees, after all; but I also said what I could to be nice to her. Your sister is charming—awfully pretty and modest. If you were to press me I should tell you frankly that it seems to me rather a social muddle, this rubbing shoulders of 'nice girls' and filles de theatre: I shouldn't think it would do your poor young things much good. However, it's their own affair, and no doubt there's no more need of their thinking we're worse than we are than of their thinking we're better. The people they live with don't seem to know the difference—I sometimes make my reflexions about the public one works for."

"Ah if you go in for the public's knowing differences you're far too particular," Nick laughed. "D'ou tombez-vous? as you affected French people say. If you've anything at stake on that you had simply better not play."

"Dear Mr. Dormer, don't encourage her to be so dreadful; for it is dreadful, the way she talks," Mrs. Rooth broke in. "One would think we weren't respectable—one would think I had never known what I've known and been what I've been."

"What one would think, beloved mother, is that you're a still greater humbug than you are. It's you, on the contrary, who go down on your knees, who pour forth apologies about our being vagabonds."

"Vagabonds—listen to her!—after the education I've given her and our magnificent prospects!" wailed Mrs. Rooth, sinking with clasped hands upon the nearest ottoman.

"Not after our prospects, if prospects they be: a good deal before them. Yes, you've taught me tongues and I'm greatly obliged to you—they no doubt give variety as well as incoherency to my conversation; and that of people in our line is for the most part notoriously monotonous and shoppy. The gift of tongues is in general the sign of your true adventurer. Dear mamma, I've no low standard—that's the last thing," Miriam went on. "My weakness is my exalted conception of respectability. Ah parlez-moi de ca and of the way I understand it! If I were to go in for being respectable you'd see something fine. I'm awfully conservative and I know what respectability is, even when I meet people of society on the accidental middle ground of either glowering or smirking. I know also what it isn't—it isn't the sweet union of well-bred little girls ('carefully-nurtured,' don't they call them?) and painted she-mummers. I should carry it much further than any of these people: I should never look at the likes of us! Every hour I live I see that the wisdom of the ages was in the experience of dear old Madame Carre—was in a hundred things she told me. She's founded on a rock. After that," Miriam went on to her host, "I can assure you that if you were so good as to bring Miss Dormer to see us we should be angelically careful of her and surround her with every attention and precaution."

"The likes of us—the likes of us!" Mrs. Rooth repeated plaintively and with a resentment as vain as a failure to sneeze. "I don't know what you're talking about and I decline to be turned upside down, I've my ideas as well as you, and I repudiate the charge of false humility. I've been through too many troubles to be proud, and a pleasant, polite manner was the rule of my life even in the days when, God knows, I had everything. I've never changed and if with God's help I had a civil tongue then, I've a civil tongue now. It's more than you always have, my poor, perverse, passionate child. Once a lady always a lady—all the footlights in the world, turn them up as high as you will, make no difference there. And I think people know it, people who know anything—if I may use such an expression—and it's because they know it that I'm not afraid to address them in a pleasant way. So I must say—and I call Mr. Dormer to witness, for if he could reason with you a bit about it he might render several people a service—your conduct to Mr. Sherringham simply breaks my heart," Mrs. Rooth concluded, taking a jump of several steps in the fine modern avenue of her argument.

Nick was appealed to, but he hung back, drawing with a free hand, and while he forbore Miriam took it up. "Mother's good—mother's very good; but it's only little by little that you discover how good she is." This seemed to leave him at ease to ask their companion, with the preliminary intimation that what she had just said was very striking, what she meant by her daughter's conduct to old Peter. Before Mrs. Rooth could answer this question, however, Miriam broke across with one of her own. "Do you mind telling me if you made your sister go off with Mr. Sherringham because you knew it was about time for me to turn up? Poor Mr. Dormer, I get you into trouble, don't I?" she added quite with tenderness.

"Into trouble?" echoed Nick, looking at her head but not at her eyes.

"Well, we won't talk about that!" she returned with a rich laugh.

He now hastened to say that he had nothing to do with his sister's leaving the studio—she had only come, as it happened, for a moment. She had walked away with Peter Sherringham because they were cousins and old friends: he was to leave England immediately, for a long time, and he had offered her his company going home. Mrs. Rooth shook her head very knowingly over the "long time" Mr. Sherringham would be absent—she plainly had her ideas about that; and she conscientiously related that in the course of the short conversation they had all had at the door of the house her daughter had reminded Miss Dormer of something that had passed between them in Paris on the question of the charming young lady's modelling her head.

"I did it to make the idea of our meeting less absurd—to put it on the footing of our both being artists. I don't ask you if she has talent," said Miriam.

"Then I needn't tell you," laughed Nick.

"I'm sure she has talent and a very refined inspiration. I see something in that corner, covered with a mysterious veil," Mrs. Rooth insinuated; which led Miriam to go on immediately:

"Has she been trying her hand at Mr. Sherringham?"

"When should she try her hand, poor dear young lady? He's always sitting with us," said Mrs. Rooth.

"Dear mamma, you exaggerate. He has his moments—when he seems to say his prayers to me; but we've had some success in cutting them down. Il s'est bien detache ces jours-ci, and I'm very happy for him. Of course it's an impertinent allusion for me to make; but I should be so delighted if I could think of him as a little in love with Miss Dormer," the girl pursued, addressing Nick.

"He is, I think, just a little—just a tiny bit," her artist allowed, working away; while Mrs. Rooth ejaculated to her daughter simultaneously:

"How can you ask such fantastic questions when you know he's dying for you?"

"Oh dying!—he's dying very hard!" cried Miriam. "Mr. Sherringham's a man of whom I can't speak with too much esteem and affection and who may be destined to perish by some horrid fever (which God forbid!) in the unpleasant country he's going to. But he won't have caught his fever from your humble servant."

"You may kill him even while you remain in perfect health yourself," said Nick; "and since we're talking of the matter I don't see the harm of my confessing that he strikes me as far gone—oh as very bad indeed."

"And yet he's in love with your sister?—je n'y suis plus."

"He tries to be, for he sees that as regards you there are difficulties. He'd like to put his hand on some nice girl who'd be an antidote to his poison."

"Difficulties are a mild name for them; poison even is a mild name for the ill he suffers from. The principal difficulty is that he doesn't know what the devil he wants. The next is that I don't either—or what the devil I want myself. I only know what I don't want," Miriam kept on brightly and as if uttering some happy, beneficent truth. "I don't want a person who takes things even less simply than I do myself. Mr. Sherringham, poor man, must be very uncomfortable, for one side of him's in a perpetual row with the other side. He's trying to serve God and Mammon, and I don't know how God will come off. What I like in you is that you've definitely let Mammon go—it's the only decent way. That's my earnest conviction, and yet they call us people light. Dear Mr. Sherringham has tremendous ambitions—tremendous riguardi, as we used to say in Italy. He wants to enjoy every comfort and to save every appearance, and all without making a scrap of a sacrifice. He expects others—me, for instance—to make all the sacrifices. Merci, much as I esteem him and much as I owe him! I don't know how he ever came to stray at all into our bold, bad, downright Bohemia: it was a cruel trick for fortune to play him. He can't keep out of it, he's perpetually making dashes across the border, and yet as soon as he gets here he's on pins and needles. There's another in whose position—if I were in it—I wouldn't look at the likes of us!"

"I don't know much about the matter," Nick brought out after some intent smudging, "but I've an idea Peter thinks he has made or at least is making sacrifices."

"So much the better—you must encourage him, you must help him."

"I don't know what my daughter's talking about," Mrs. Rooth contributed—"she's much too paradoxical for my plain mind. But there's one way to encourage Mr. Sherringham—there's one way to help him; and perhaps it won't be a worse way for a gentleman of your good nature that it will help me at the same time. Can't I look to you, dear Mr. Dormer, to see that he does come to the theatre to-night—that he doesn't feel himself obliged to stay away?"

"What danger is there of his staying away?" Nick asked.

"If he's bent on sacrifices that's a very good one to begin with," Miriam observed.

"That's the mad, bad way she talks to him—she has forbidden the dear unhappy gentleman the house!" her mother cried. "She brought it up to him just now at the door—before Miss Dormer: such very odd form! She pretends to impose her commands upon him."

"Oh he'll be there—we're going to dine together," said Nick. And when Miriam asked him what that had to do with it he went on: "Why we've arranged it; I'm going, and he won't let me go alone."

"You're going? I sent you no places," his sitter objected.

"Yes, but I've got one. Why didn't you, after all I've done for you?"

She beautifully thought of it. "Because I'm so good. No matter," she added, "if Mr. Sherringham comes I won't act."

"Won't you act for me?"

"She'll act like an angel," Mrs. Rooth protested. "She might do, she might be, anything in all the world; but she won't take common pains."

"Of one thing there's no doubt," said Miriam: "that compared with the rest of us—poor passionless creatures—mamma does know what she wants."

"And what's that?" Nick inquired, chalking on.

"She wants everything."

"Never, never—I'm much more humble," retorted the old woman; upon which her daughter requested her to give then to Mr. Dormer, who was a reasonable man and an excellent judge, a general idea of the scope of her desires.

As, however, Mrs. Rooth, sighing and deprecating, was not quick to acquit herself, the girl tried a short cut to the truth with the abrupt demand: "Do you believe for a single moment he'd marry me?"

"Why he has proposed to you—you've told me yourself—a dozen times."

"Proposed what to me?" Miriam rang out. "I've told you that neither a dozen times nor once, because I've never understood. He has made wonderful speeches, but has never been serious."

"You told me he had been in the seventh heaven of devotion, especially that night we went to the foyer of the Francais," Mrs. Rooth insisted.

"Do you call the seventh heaven of devotion serious? He's in love with me, je le veux bien; he's so poisoned—Mr. Dormer vividly puts it—as to require a strong antidote; but he has never spoken to me as if he really expected me to listen to him, and he's the more of a gentleman from that fact. He knows we haven't a square foot of common ground—that a grasshopper can't set up a house with a fish. So he has taken care to say to me only more than he can possibly mean. That makes it stand just for nothing."

"Did he say more than he can possibly mean when he took formal leave of you yesterday—for ever and ever?" the old woman cried.

On which Nick re-enforced her. "And don't you call that—his taking formal leave—a sacrifice?"

"Oh he took it all back, his sacrifice, before he left the house."

"Then has that no meaning?" demanded Mrs. Rooth.

"None that I can make out," said her daughter.

"Ah I've no patience with you: you can be stupid when you will—you can be even that too!" the poor lady groaned.

"What mamma wishes me to understand and to practise is the particular way to be artful with Mr. Sherringham," said Miriam. "There are doubtless depths of wisdom and virtue in it. But I see only one art—that of being perfectly honest."

"I like to hear you talk—it makes you live, brings you out," Nick contentedly dropped. "And you sit beautifully still. All I want to say is please continue to do so: remain exactly as you are—it's rather important—for the next ten minutes."

"We're washing our dirty linen before you, but it's all right," the girl returned, "because it shows you what sort of people we are, and that's what you need to know. Don't make me vague and arranged and fine in this new view," she continued: "make me characteristic and real; make life, with all its horrid facts and truths, stick out of me. I wish you could put mother in too; make us live there side by side and tell our little story. 'The wonderful actress and her still more wonderful mamma'—don't you think that's an awfully good subject?"

Mrs. Rooth, at this, cried shame on her daughter's wanton humour, professing that she herself would never accept so much from Nick's good nature, and Miriam settled it that at any rate he was some day and in some way to do her mother, really do her, and so make her, as one of the funniest persons that ever was, live on through the ages.

"She doesn't believe Mr. Sherringham wants to marry me any more than you do," the girl, taking up her dispute again after a moment, represented to Nick; "but she believes—how indeed can I tell you what she believes?—that I can work it so well, if you understand, that in the fulness of time I shall hold him in a vice. I'm to keep him along for the present, but not to listen to him, for if I listen to him I shall lose him. It's ingenious, it's complicated; but I daresay you follow me."

"Don't move—don't move," said Nick. "Pardon a poor clumsy beginner."

"No, I shall explain quietly. Somehow—here it's very complicated and you mustn't lose the thread—I shall be an actress and make a tremendous lot of money, and somehow too (I suppose a little later) I shall become an ambassadress and be the favourite of courts. So you see it will all be delightful. Only I shall have to go very straight. Mamma reminds me of a story I once heard about the mother of a young lady who was in receipt of much civility from the pretender to a crown, which indeed he, and the young lady too, afterwards more or less wore. The old countess watched the course of events and gave her daughter the cleverest advice: 'Tiens bon, ma fille, and you shall sit upon a throne.' Mamma wishes me to tenir bon—she apparently thinks there's a danger I mayn't—so that if I don't sit upon a throne I shall at least parade at the foot of one. And if before that, for ten years, I pile up the money, they'll forgive me the way I've made it. I should hope so, if I've tenu bon! Only ten years is a good while to hold out, isn't it? If it isn't Mr. Sherringham it will be some one else. Mr. Sherringham has the great merit of being a bird in the hand. I'm to keep him along, I'm to be still more diplomatic than even he can be."

Mrs. Rooth listened to her daughter with an air of assumed reprobation which melted, before the girl had done, into a diverted, complacent smile—the gratification of finding herself the proprietress of so much wit and irony and grace. Miriam's account of her mother's views was a scene of comedy, and there was instinctive art in the way she added touch to touch and made point upon point. She was so quiet, to oblige her painter, that only her fine lips moved—all her expression was in their charming utterance. Mrs. Rooth, after the first flutter of a less cynical spirit, consented to be sacrificed to an effect of the really high order she had now been educated to recognise; so that she scarce hesitated, when Miriam had ceased speaking, before she tittered out with the fondest indulgence: 'Comedienne!' And she seemed to appeal to their companion. "Ain't she fascinating? That's the way she does for you!"

"It's rather cruel, isn't it," said Miriam, "to deprive people of the luxury of calling one an actress as they'd call one a liar? I represent, but I represent truly."

"Mr. Sherringham would marry you to-morrow—there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness.

Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "Voyons, look about you: they don't marry us like that."

"But they do—cela se voit tous les jours. Ask Mr. Dormer."

"Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof."

"I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over."

Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say."

"Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth.

"Do you want me to leave it then?"

"Oh you can manage if you will!"

"The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through."

"But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?"

"I only know one," said Miriam.

At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street."

"Mamma's bewildered—there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park—you always delight in that—and come back for me in an hour."

"I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?"

"Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest—I should be magnanimous."

"We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth.

"How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly.

"Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you."

"Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly.

"Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act."

"I'll act for him," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother.

"It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously.

"Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later—but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "This is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it.



XLV

Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage—she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state.

This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement—the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed—the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation—she would have fed the memory with deep draughts.

One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism—rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together—they were determined not to be late—Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act—a scene from which Miriam was absent—Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them—I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure.

After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?"

To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her."

"Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes."

He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port—they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam—yes, positively—was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act—it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh—apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up—perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that her fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds—"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one.

It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this—on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted—present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view.

The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something—he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come."

"To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick.

"Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards.

When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house—the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him—he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit.

On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration—words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card.

"That's no use—it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object—a bracelet, a glove, or a flower—to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling—only fly!"

His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick.

"I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?"

"Give her a hand? I hated it."

"My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together."

"Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there."

"Miss Rooth? Why it's all for her."

"I'm waiting for a word from her—she may change her mind."

Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?"

"I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice.

"I say—!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him.

"She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'"

Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through him?"

"Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"—on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth:

"Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it."

"Oh I can't pay you for that!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper.



XLVI

Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain—couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place.

He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate—then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him—that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both—that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons—Peter remembered now the neglected shilling—only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her.

When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature—this showed it—as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed.

She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman—they had left the garden door open—"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again."

"What's the matter—won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter—please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her.

"I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself—that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path.

Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was—in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength."

"Oh I knew—I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield.

"The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength—that was just the reason of my coming."

She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want—when I understand—you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them."

"You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply.

"Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?"

"Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed.

"The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!"

"Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was—I was. But I can't—I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me."

"Oh don't—please don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?"

"It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me."

"And what's the whole thing?"

He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!"

"Well, I'm not. Go on."

"Give it up—give it up!" Peter stammered.

"Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa.

"I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before."

"Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones—you wanted something of that sort a year ago."

"Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference—I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate—It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things."

She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?"

"The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really—put them even at that—than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you."

"You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?"

"They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday—where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want."

"The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile.

"I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on.

"How can I, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. Voyons, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, pourtant. Dear me, why do you like us so much?"

"Like you? I loathe you!"

"Je le vois parbleu bien!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!"

"Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you."

Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you like that?"

"Like my wife to be the most brilliant woman in Europe? I think I can do with it."

"Aren't you afraid of me?"

"Not a bit."

"Bravely said. How little you know me after all!" sighed the girl.

"I tell the truth," Peter ardently went on; "and you must do me the justice to admit that I've taken the time to dig deep into my feelings. I'm not an infatuated boy; I've lived, I've had experience, I've observed; in short I know what I mean and what I want. It isn't a thing to reason about; it's simply a need that consumes me. I've put it on starvation diet, but that's no use—really, it's no use, Miriam," the young man declared with a ring that spoke enough of his sincerity. "It is no question of my trusting you; it's simply a question of your trusting me. You're all right, as I've heard you say yourself; you're frank, spontaneous, generous; you're a magnificent creature. Just quietly marry me and I'll manage you."

"'Manage' me?" The girl's inflexion was droll; it made him change colour.

"I mean I'll give you a larger life than the largest you can get in any other way. The stage is great, no doubt, but the world's greater. It's a bigger theatre than any of those places in the Strand. We'll go in for realities instead of fables, and you'll do them far better than you do the fables."

Miriam had listened attentively, but her face that could so show things showed her despair at his perverted ingenuity. "Pardon my saying it after your delightful tributes to my worth," she returned in a moment, "but I've never listened to anything quite so grandly unreal. You think so well of me that humility itself ought to keep me silent; nevertheless I must utter a few shabby words of sense. I'm a magnificent creature on the stage—well and good; it's what I want to be and it's charming to see such evidence that I succeed. But off the stage, woe betide us both, I should lose all my advantages. The fact's so patent that it seems to me I'm very good-natured even to discuss it with you."

"Are you on the stage now, pray? Ah Miriam, if it weren't for the respect I owe you!" her companion wailed.

"If it weren't for that I shouldn't have come here to meet you. My gift is the thing that takes you: could there be a better proof than that it's to-night's display of it that has brought you to this unreason? It's indeed a misfortune that you're so sensitive to our poor arts, since they play such tricks with your power to see things as they are. Without my share of them I should be a dull, empty, third-rate woman, and yet that's the fate you ask me to face and insanely pretend you're ready to face yourself."

"Without it—without it?" Sherringham cried. "Your own sophistry's infinitely worse than mine. I should like to see you without it for the fiftieth part of a second. What I ask you to give up is the dusty boards of the play-house and the flaring footlights, but not the very essence of your being. Your 'gift,' your genius, is yourself, and it's because it's yourself that I yearn for you. If it had been a thing you could leave behind by the easy dodge of stepping off the stage I would never have looked at you a second time. Don't talk to me as if I were a simpleton—with your own false simplifications! You were made to charm and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that—not a vulgar shop with a turnstile that's open only once in the twenty-four hours. 'Without it,' verily!" Peter proceeded with a still, deep heat that kept down in a manner his rising scorn and exasperated passion. "Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and the wonder of your look!"

Miriam at this moved away from him with a port that resembled what she sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the footlights and then after a few steps grandly swept round again. This evolution she performed—it was over in an instant—on the present occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head admirably erect. "Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other solution never occurs to you."

"The other solution?"

"That you should stay on the stage."

"I don't understand you," her friend gloomed.

"Stay on my stage. Come off your own."

For a little he said nothing; then: "You mean that if I'll do that you'll have me?"

"I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice on your own side it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive light."

"Continue to let you act—as my wife?" he appealed. "Is it a real condition? Am I to understand that those are your terms?"

"I may say so without fear, because you'll never accept them."

"Would you accept them from me?" he demanded; "accept the manly, the professional sacrifice, see me throw up my work, my prospects—of course I should have to do that—and simply become your appendage?"

She raised her arms for a prodigious fall. "My dear fellow, you invite me with the best conscience in the world to become yours."

"The cases are not equal. You'd make of me the husband of an actress. I should make of you the wife of an ambassador."

"The husband of an actress, c'est bientot dit, in that tone of scorn! If you're consistent," said Miriam, all lucid and hard, "it ought to be a proud position for you."

"What do you mean, if I'm consistent?"

"Haven't you always insisted on the beauty and interest of our art and the greatness of our mission? Haven't you almost come to blows with poor Gabriel Nash about it? What did all that mean if you won't face the first consequences of your theory? Either it was an enlightened conviction or it was an empty pretence. If you were only talking against time I'm glad to know it," she rolled out with a darkening eye. "The better the cause, it seems to me, the better the deed; and if the theatre is important to the 'human spirit,' as you used to say so charmingly, and if into the bargain you've the pull of being so fond of me, I don't see why it should be monstrous of you to give us your services in an intelligent, indirect way. Of course if you're not serious we needn't talk at all; but if you are, with your conception of what the actor can do, why is it so base to come to the actor's aid, taking one devotion with another? If I'm so fine I'm worth looking after a bit, and the place where I'm finest is the place to look after me!"

He had a long pause again, taking her in as it seemed to him he had never done. "You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest domesticity of private life. I've no conception whatever of what the actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the theatre. Any infatuation of that sort has completely dropped from me, and for all I care the theatre may go to the dogs—which I judge it altogether probably will!"

"You're dishonest, you're ungrateful, you're false!" Miriam flashed. "It was the theatre brought you here—if it hadn't been for the theatre I never would have looked at you. It was in the name of the theatre you first made love to me; it's to the theatre you owe every advantage that, so far as I'm concerned, you possess."

"I seem to possess a great many!" poor Peter derisively groaned.

"You might avail yourself better of those you have! You make me angry, but I want to be fair," said the shining creature, "and I can't be unless you are. You're not fair, nor candid, nor honourable, when you swallow your words and abjure your faith, when you throw over old friends and old memories for a selfish purpose."

"'Selfish purpose' is, in your own convenient idiom, bientot dit," Peter promptly answered. "I suppose you consider that if I truly esteemed you I should be ashamed to deprive the world of the light of your genius. Perhaps my esteem isn't of the right quality—there are different kinds, aren't there? At any rate I've explained to you that I propose to deprive the world of nothing at all. You shall be celebrated, allez!"

"Vain words, vain words, my dear!" and she turned off again in her impatience. "I know of course," she added quickly, "that to befool yourself with such twaddle you must be pretty bad."

"Yes, I'm pretty bad," he admitted, looking at her dismally. "What do you do with the declaration you made me the other day—the day I found my cousin here—that you'd take me if I should come to you as one who had risen high?"

Miriam thought of it. "I remember—the chaff about the honours, the orders, the stars and garters. My poor foolish friend, don't be so painfully literal. Don't you know a joke when you see it? It was to worry your cousin, wasn't it? But it didn't in the least succeed."

"Why should you wish to worry my cousin?"

"Because he's so provoking!" she instantly answered; after which she laughed as if for her falling too simply into the trap he had laid. "Surely, at all events, I had my freedom no less than I have it now. Pray what explanations should I have owed you and in what fear of you should I have gone? However, that has nothing to do with it. Say I did tell you that we might arrange it on the day you should come to me covered with glory in the shape of little tinkling medals: why should you anticipate that transaction by so many years and knock me down such a long time in advance? Where's the glory, please, and where are the medals?"

"Dearest girl, am I not going to strange parts—a capital promotion—next month," he insistently demanded, "and can't you trust me enough to believe I speak with a real appreciation of the facts (that I'm not lying to you in short) when I tell you I've my foot in the stirrup? The glory's dawning. I'm all right too."

"What you propose to me, then, is to accompany you tout bonnement to your new post. What you propose to me is to pack up and start?"

"You put it in a nutshell." But Peter's smile was strained.

"You're touching—it has its charm. But you can't get anything in any of the Americas, you know. I'm assured there are no medals to be picked up in those parts—which are therefore 'strange' indeed. That's why the diplomatic body hate them all."

"They're on the way, they're on the way!"—he could only feverishly hammer. "The people here don't keep us long in disagreeable places unless we want to stay. There's one thing you can get anywhere if you've ability, and nowhere if you've not, and in the disagreeable places generally more than in the others; and that—since it's the element of the question we're discussing—is simply success. It's odious to be put on one's swagger, but I protest against being treated as if I had nothing to offer—to offer a person who has such glories of her own. I'm not a little presumptuous ass; I'm a man accomplished and determined, and the omens are on my side." Peter faltered a moment and then with a queer expression went on: "Remember, after all, that, strictly speaking, your glories are also still in the future." An exclamation at these words burst from Miriam's lips, but her companion resumed quickly: "Ask my official superiors, ask any of my colleagues, if they consider I've nothing to offer."

He had an idea as he ceased speaking that she was on the point of breaking out with some strong word of resentment at his allusion to the contingent nature of her prospects. But it only deepened his wound to hear her say with extraordinary mildness: "It's perfectly true that my glories are still to come, that I may fizzle out and that my little success of to-day is perhaps a mere flash in the pan. Stranger things have been—something of that sort happens every day. But don't we talk too much of that part of it?" she asked with a weary patience that was noble in its effect. "Surely it's vulgar to think only of the noise one's going to make—especially when one remembers how utterly betes most of the people will be among whom one makes it. It isn't to my possible glories I cling; it's simply to my idea, even if it's destined to betray me and sink me. I like it better than anything else—a thousand times better (I'm sorry to have to put it in such a way) than tossing up my head as the fine lady of a little coterie."

"A little coterie? I don't know what you're talking about!"—for this at least Peter could fight.

"A big coterie, then! It's only that at the best. A nasty, prim, 'official' woman who's perched on her little local pedestal and thinks she's a queen for ever because she's ridiculous for an hour! Oh you needn't tell me, I've seen them abroad—the dreariest females—and could imitate them here. I could do one for you on the spot if I weren't so tired. It's scarcely worth mentioning perhaps all this while—but I'm ready to drop." She picked up the white mantle she had tossed off, flinging it round her with her usual amplitude of gesture. "They're waiting for me and I confess I'm hungry. If I don't hurry they'll eat up all the nice things. Don't say I haven't been obliging, and come back when you're better. Good-night."

"I quite agree with you that we've talked too much about the vulgar side of our question," Peter returned, walking round to get between her and the French window by which she apparently had a view of leaving the room. "That's because I've wanted to bribe you. Bribery's almost always vulgar."

"Yes, you should do better. Merci! There's a cab: some of them have come for me. I must go," she added, listening for a sound that reached her from the road.

Peter listened too, making out no cab. "Believe me, it isn't wise to turn your back on such an affection as mine and on such a confidence," he broke out again, speaking almost in a warning tone—there was a touch of superior sternness in it, as of a rebuke for real folly, but it was meant to be tender—and stopping her within a few feet of the window. "Such things are the most precious that life has to give us," he added all but didactically.

She had listened once more for a little; then she appeared to give up the idea of the cab. The reader need hardly be told that at this stage of her youthful history the right way for her lover to take her wouldn't have been to picture himself as acting for her highest good. "I like your calling the feeling with which I inspire you confidence," she presently said; and the deep note of the few words had something of the distant mutter of thunder.

"What is it, then, when I offer you everything I have, everything I am, everything I shall ever be?"

She seemed to measure him as for the possible success of an attempt to pass him. But she remained where she was. "I'm sorry for you, yes, but I'm also rather ashamed."

"Ashamed of me?"

"A brave offer to see me through—that's what I should call confidence. You say to-day that you hate the theatre—and do you know what has made you do it? The fact that it has too large a place in your mind to let you disown it and throw it over with a good conscience. It has a deep fascination for you, and yet you're not strong enough to do so enlightened and public a thing as take up with it in my person. You're ashamed of yourself for that, as all your constant high claims for it are on record; so you blaspheme against it to try and cover your retreat and your treachery and straighten out your personal situation. But it won't do, dear Mr. Sherringham—it won't do at all," Miriam proceeded with a triumphant, almost judicial lucidity which made her companion stare; "you haven't the smallest excuse of stupidity, and your perversity is no excuse whatever. Leave her alone altogether—a poor girl who's making her way—or else come frankly to help her, to give her the benefit of your wisdom. Don't lock her up for life under the pretence of doing her good. What does one most good is to see a little honesty. You're the best judge, the best critic, the best observer, the best believer, that I've ever come across: you're committed to it by everything you've said to me for a twelvemonth, by the whole turn of your mind, by the way you've followed us up, all of us, from far back. If an art's noble and beneficent one shouldn't be afraid to offer it one's arm. Your cousin isn't: he can make sacrifices."

"My cousin?" Peter amazedly echoed. "Why, wasn't it only the other day you were throwing his sacrifices in his teeth?"

Under this imputation on her straightness Miriam flinched but for an instant. "I did that to worry you," she smiled.

"Why should you wish to worry me if you care so little about me?"

"Care little about you? Haven't I told you often, didn't I tell you yesterday, how much I care? Ain't I showing it now by spending half the night here with you—giving myself away to all those cynics—taking all this trouble to persuade you to hold up your head and have the courage of your opinions?"

"You invent my opinions for your convenience," said Peter all undaunted. "As long ago as the night I introduced you, in Paris, to Mademoiselle Voisin, you accused me of looking down on those who practise your art. I remember how you came down on me because I didn't take your friend Dashwood seriously enough. Perhaps I didn't; but if already at that time I was so wide of the mark you can scarcely accuse me of treachery now."

"I don't remember, but I daresay you're right," Miriam coldly meditated. "What I accused you of then was probably simply what I reproach you with now—the germ at least of your deplorable weakness. You consider that we do awfully valuable work, and yet you wouldn't for the world let people suppose you really take our side. If your position was even at that time so false, so much the worse for you, that's all. Oh it's refreshing," his formidable friend exclaimed after a pause during which Peter seemed to himself to taste the full bitterness of despair, so baffled and cheapened he intimately felt—"oh it's refreshing to see a man burn his ships in a cause that appeals to him, give up something precious for it and break with horrid timidities and snobberies! It's the most beautiful sight in the world."

Poor Peter, sore as he was, and with the cold breath of failure in his face, nevertheless burst out laughing at this fine irony. "You're magnificent, you give me at this moment the finest possible illustration of what you mean by burning one's ships. Verily, verily there's no one like you: talk of timidity, talk of refreshment! If I had any talent for it I'd go on the stage to-morrow, so as to spend my life with you the better."

"If you'll do that I'll be your wife the day after your first appearance. That would be really respectable," Miriam said.

"Unfortunately I've no talent."

"That would only make it the more respectable."

"You're just like poor Nick," Peter returned—"you've taken to imitating Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your contrasting me invidiously with Nick and in my giving up one career for another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your smelling-bottle—!" he concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to debate.

"Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing a very small part of the whole precious service, the protection and encouragement, for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a man interested in her work and as accomplished and determined as you very justly describe yourself."

"And would it be your idea that such a man should live on the money earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and still more determined wife?"

"Why not if they work together—if there's something of his spirit and his support in everything she does?" Miriam demanded. "Je vous attendais with the famous 'person'; of course that's the great stick they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have anything decent to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea, it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the clumsy body. Poor old 'person'—if you knew what we think of it! If you don't forget it that's your own affair: it shows you're dense before the idea."

"That I'm dense?"—and Peter appealed to their lamplit solitude, the favouring, intimate night that only witnessed his defeat, as if this outrage had been all that was wanting.

"I mean the public is—the public who pays us. After all, they expect us to look at them too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in the stalls before one for three mortal hours! I daresay it would be simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all showing ourselves all the while; only some of us are not worth paying."

"You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you," he said, his handsome face drawn by his pain to a contraction sufficiently attesting the fact. "Do you remember the second time I ever saw you—the day you recited at my place?" he abruptly asked; a good deal as if he were taking from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also one of the sharpest.