The tragic muse

1

     The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a general thing, are, to their perception, an inexpressive and speechless race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness of contact with verbal or other embroidery. This view might have derived encouragement, a few years ago, in Paris, from the manner in which four persons sat together in silence, one fine day about noon, in the garden, as it is called, of the Palais de l’Industrie – the central court of the great glazed bazaar where, among plants and parterres, gravelled walks and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and groups, the monuments and busts, which form, in the annual exhibition of the Salon, the department of statuary. The spirit of observation is naturally high at the Salon, quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but no particular tension of the visual sense would have been required to embrace the character of the four persons in question. As a solicitation of the eye on definite grounds, they too constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial observer would have perceived them to be striking products of an insular neighbourhood, representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday – Christmas and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn – Paris besprinkles itself at a night’s notice. They had about them the indefinable professional look of the British traveller abroad; that air of preparation for exposure, material and moral, which is so oddly combined with the serene revelation of security and of persistence, and which excites, according to individual susceptibility, the ire or the admiration of foreign communities. They were the more unmistakable as they illustrated very favourably the energetic race to which they had the honour to belong. The fresh, diffused light of the Salon made them clear and important; they were finished productions, in their way, and ranged there motionless, on their green bench, they were almost as much on exhibition as if they had been hung on the line.
     Three ladies and a young man, they were obviously a family – a mother, two daughters and a son – a circumstance which had the effect at once of making each member of the group doubly typical and of helping to account for their fine taciturnity. They were not, with each other, on terms of ceremony, and moreover they were probably fatigued with their course among the pictures, the rooms on the upper floor. Their attitude, on the part of visitors who had superior features, even if they might appear to some passers-by to have neglected a fine opportunity for completing these features with an expression, was after all a kind of tribute to the state of exhaustion, of bewilderment, to which the genius of France is still capable of reducing the proud.
     “En v’la des abrutis!” more than one of their fellow-gazers might have been heard to exclaim; and certain it is that there was something depressed and discouraged in this interesting group, who sat looking vaguely before them, not noticing the life of the place, somewhat as if each had a private anxiety. A very close observer would have guessed that though on many questions they were closely united, this present anxiety was not the same for each. If they looked grave, moreover, this was doubtless partly the result of their all being dressed in mourning, as if for a recent bereavement. The eldest of the three ladies had indeed a face of a fine austere mould, which would have been moved to gaiety only by some force more insidious than any she was likely to recognize in Paris. Cold, still and considerably worn, it was neither stupid nor hard, but it was firm, narrow and sharp. This competent matron, acquainted evidently with grief, but not weakened by it, had a high forehead, to which the quality of the skin gave a singular polish – it glittered even when seen at a distance; a nose which achieved a high, free curve; and a tendency to throw back her head and carry it well above her, as if to disengage it from the possible entanglements of the rest of her person. If you had seen her walk you would have perceived that she trod the earth in a manner suggesting that in a world where she had long since discovered that one couldn’t have one’s own way, one could never tell what annoying aggression might take place, so that it was well, from hour to hour, to save what one could. Lady Agnes saved her head, her white triangular forehead, over which her closely crinkled flaxen hair, reproduced in different shades in her children, made a sort of looped silken canopy, like the marquee at a garden-party. Her daughters were tall, like herself – that was visible even as they sat there – and one of them, the younger evidently, was very pretty: a straight, slender, gray-eyed English girl, with a ‘good’ figure and a fresh complexion. The sister, who was not pretty, was also straight and slender and gray-eyed. But the gray, in this case, was not so pure, nor were the slenderness and the straightness so maidenly. The brother of these young ladies had taken off his hat, as if he felt the air of the summer day heavy in the great pavilion. He was a lean, strong, clear-faced youth, with a straight nose and light-brown hair, which lay continuously and profusely back from his forehead, so that to smooth it from the brow to the neck but a single movement of the hand was required. I cannot describe him better than by saying that he was the sort of young Englishman who looks particularly well abroad, and whose general aspect – his inches, his limbs, his friendly eyes, the modulation of his voice, the cleanness of his flesh-tints and the fashion of his garments – excites on the part of those who encounter him in far countries on the ground of a common speech a delightful sympathy of race. This sympathy is sometimes qualified by an apprehension of undue literalness, but it almost revels as soon as such a danger is dispelled. We shall see quickly enough how accurate a measure it might have taken of Nicholas Dormer. There was food for suspicion, perhaps, in the wandering blankness that sat at moments in his eyes, as if he had no attention at all, not the least in the world, at his command; but it is no more than just to add, without delay, that this discouraging symptom was known, among those who liked him, by the indulgent name of dreaminess. For his mother and sisters, for instance, his dreaminess was notorious. He is the more welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there is always held to be something engaging in the combination of the muscular and the musing, the mildness of strength.
     After some time – a period during which these good people might have appeared to have come, individually, to the Palais de l’Industrie much less to see the works of art than to think over their domestic affairs – the young man, rousing himself from his reverie, addressed one of the girls.
     “I say, Biddy, why should we sit moping here all day? Come and take a turn about with me.”
     His younger sister, while he got up, leaned forward a little, looking round her, but she gave, for the moment, no further sign of complying with his invitation.
     “Where shall we find you, then, if Peter comes?” inquired the other Miss Dormer, making no movement at all.
     “I dare say Peter won’t come. He’ll leave us here to cool our heels.”
     “Oh, Nick, dear!” Biddy exclaimed in a sweet little voice of protest. It was plainly her theory that Peter would come, and even, a little, her apprehension that she might miss him should she quit that spot.
     “We shall come back in a quarter of an hour. Really, I must look at these things,” Nick declared, turning his face to a marble group which stood near them, on the right – a man, with the skin of a beast round his loins, tussling with a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or capture.
     Lady Agnes followed the direction of her son’s eyes, and then observed:
     “Everything seems very dreadful. I should think Biddy had better sit still. Hasn’t she seen enough horrors up above?”
     “I dare say that if Peter comes Julia will be with him,” the elder girl remarked irrelevantly.
     “Well, then, he can take Julia about. That will be more proper,” said Lady Agnes.
     “Mother, dear, she doesn’t care a rap about art. It’s a fearful bore looking at fine things with Julia,” Nick rejoined.
     “Won’t you go with him, Grace?” said Biddy, appealing to her sister.
     “I think she has awfully good taste!” Grace exclaimed, not answering this inquiry.
     “Don’t say nasty things about her!” Lady Agnes broke out, solemnly, to her son, after resting her eyes on him a moment with an air of reluctant reprobation.
     “I say nothing but what she’d say herself,” the young man replied. “About some things she has very good taste, but about this kind of thing she has no taste at all.”
     “That’s better, I think.” said Lady Agnes, turning her eyes again to the ‘kind of thing’ that her son appeared to designate.
     “She’s awfully clever – awfully!” Grace went on, with decision.
     “Awfully, awfully,” her brother repeated, standing in front of her and smiling down at her.
     “You are nasty, Nick. You know you are,” said the young lady, but more in sorrow than in anger.
     Biddy got up at this, as if the accusatory tone prompted her to place herself generously at his side. “Mightn’t you go and order lunch, in that place, you know?” she asked of her mother. “Then we would come back when it was ready.”
     “My dear child, I can’t order lunch,” Lady Agnes replied, with a cold impatience which seemed to intimate that she had problems far more important than those of victualling to contend with.
     “I mean Peter, if he comes. I am sure he’s up in everything of that sort.”
     “Oh, hang Peter!” Nick exclaimed. “Leave him out of account, and do order lunch, mother; but not cold beef and pickles.”
     “I must say – about him – you’re not nice,” Biddy ventured to remark to her brother, hesitating, and even blushing, a little.
     “You make up for it, my dear,” the young man answered, giving her chin – a very charming, rotund little chin – a friendly whisk with his forefinger.
     “I can’t imagine what you’ve got against him,” her ladyship murmured, gravely.
     “Dear mother, it’s a disappointed fondness,” Nick argued. “They won’t answer one’s notes; they won’t let one know where they are nor what to expect. ‘Hell has no fury like a woman scorned’; nor like a man either.”
     “Peter has such a tremendous lot to do – it’s a very busy time at the Embassy; there are sure to he reasons,” Biddy explained, with her pretty eyes.
     “Reasons enough, no doubt!” said Lady Agnes, who accompanied these words with an ambiguous sigh, however, as if in Paris even the best reasons would naturally be bad ones.
     “Doesn’t Julia write to you, doesn’t she answer you the very day?” Grace inquired, looking at Nick as if she were the courageous one.
     He hesitated a moment, returning her glance with a certain severity. “What do you know about my correspondence? No doubt I ask too much,” he went on; “I am so attached to them. Dear old Peter, dear old Julia!”
     “She’s younger than you, my dear!” cried the elder girl, still resolute.
     “Yes, nineteen days.”
     “I’m glad you know her birthday.”
     “She knows yours; she always gives you something,” Lady Agnes resumed, to her son.
     “Her taste is good then, isn’t it, Nick?” Grace Dormer continued.
     “She makes charming presents; but, dear mother, it isn’t her taste. It’s her husband’s.”
     “Her husband’s?”
     “The beautiful objects of which she disposes so freely are the things he collected, for years, laboriously, devotedly, poor man!”
     “She disposes of them to you, but not to others,” said Lady Agnes. “But that’s all right,” she added, as if this might have been taken for a complaint of the limitations of Julia’s bounty. “She has to select, among so many, and that’s a proof of taste,” her ladyship went on.
     “You can’t say she doesn’t choose lovely ones,” Grace remarked to her brother, in a tone of some triumph.
     “My dear, they are all lovely. George Dallow’s judgement was so sure, he was incapable of making a mistake,” Nicholas Dormer returned.
     “I don’t see how you can talk of him; he was dreadful,” said Lady Agnes.
     “My dear, if he was good enough for Julia to marry, he is good enough for one to talk of.”
     “She did him a great honour.”
     “I dare say; but he was not unworthy of it. No such intelligent collection of beautiful objects has been made in England in our time.”
     “You think too much of beautiful objects,” returned her ladyship.
     “I thought you were just now implying that I thought too little.”
     “It’s very nice – his having left Julia so well off,” Biddy interposed, soothingly, as if she foresaw a tangle.
     “He treated her en grand seigneur, absolutely,” Nick went on.
     “He used to look greasy, all the same,” Grace Dormer pursued, with a kind of dull irreconcilability. “His name ought to have been Tallow.”
     “You are not saying what Julia would like, if that’s what you are trying to say,” her brother remarked.
     “Don’t be vulgar, Grace,” said Lady Agnes.
     “I know Peter Sherringham’s birthday!” Biddy broke out innocently, as a pacific diversion. She had passed her hand into her brother’s arm, to signify her readiness to go with him, while she scanned the remoter portions of the garden as if it had occurred to her that to direct their steps in some such sense might after all be the shorter way to get at Peter.
     “He’s too much older than you, my dear,” Grace rejoined, discouragingly.
     “That’s why I’ve noticed it – he’s thirty-four. Do you call that too old? I don’t care for slobbering infants!” Biddy cried.
     “Don’t be vulgar,” Lady Agnes enjoined again.
     “Come, Bid, we’ll go and be vulgar together; for that’s what we are, I’m afraid,” her brother said to her. “We’ll go and look at all these low works of art.”
     “Do you really think it’s necessary to the child’s development?” Lady Agnes demanded, as the pair turned away. Nicholas Dormer was struck as by a kind of challenge, and he paused, lingering a moment, with his little sister on his arm. “What we’ve been through this morning in this place, and what you’ve paraded before our eyes – the murders, the tortures, all kinds of disease and indecency!”
     Nick looked at his mother as if this sudden protest surprised him, but as if also there were lurking explanations of it which he quickly guessed. Her resentment had the effect not so much of animating her cold face as of making it colder, less expressive, though visibly prouder. “Ah, dear mother, don’t do the British matron!” he exclaimed, good-humouredly.
     “British matron is soon said! I don’t know what they are coming to.”
     “How odd that you should have been struck only with the disagreeable things, when, for myself, I have felt it to be the most interesting, the most suggestive morning I have passed for ever so many months!”
     “Oh, Nick, Nick!” Lady Agnes murmured, with a strange depth of feeling.
     “I like them better in London – they are much less unpleasant,” said Grace Dormer.
     “They are things you can look at,” her ladyship went on. “We certainly make the better show.”
     “The subject doesn’t matter; it’s the treatment, the treatment!” Biddy announced, in a voice like the tinkle of a silver bell.
     “Poor little Bid!” her brother cried, breaking into a laugh.
     “How can I learn to model, mamma dear, if I don’t look at things and if I don’t study them?” the girl continued.
     This inquiry passed unheeded, and Nicholas Dormer said to his mother, more seriously, but with a certain kind explicitness, as if he could make a particular allowance: “This place is an immense stimulus to me; it refreshes me, excites me, it’s such an exhibition of artistic life. It’s full of ideas, full of refinements; it gives one such an impression of artistic experience. They try everything, they feel everything. While you were looking at the murders, apparently, I observed an immense deal of curious and interesting work. There are too many of them, poor devils; so many who must make their way, who must attract attention. Some of them can only taper fort, stand on their heads, turn summersaults or commit deeds of violence, to make people notice them. After that, no doubt, a good many will be quieter. But I don’t know; to-day I’m in an appreciative mood – I feel indulgent even to them: they give me an impression of intelligence, of eager observation. All art is one – remember that, Biddy dear,” the young man continued, looking down at his sister with a smile. “It’s the same great, many-headed effort, and any ground that’s gained by an individual, any spark that’s struck in any province, is of use and of suggestion to all the others. We are all in the same boat.”
     “‘We’, do you say, my dear? Are you really setting up for an artist?” Lady Agnes asked.
     Nick hesitated a moment. “I was speaking for Biddy!”
     “But you are one, Nick – you are!” the girl cried.
     Lady Agnes looked for an instant as if she were going to say once more “Don’t be vulgar!” But she suppressed these words, if she had intended them, and uttered others, few in number and not completely articulate, to the effect that she hated talking about art. While her son spoke she had watched him as if she failed to follow him; yet something in the tone of her exclamation seemed to denote that she had understood him only too well.
     “We are all in the same boat,” Biddy repeated, smiling at her.
     “Not me, if you please!” Lady Agnes replied. “It’s horrid, messy work, your modelling.”
     “Ah, but look at the results!” said the girl, eagerly, glancing about at the monuments in the garden as if in regard even to them she were, through that unity of art that her brother had just proclaimed, in some degree an effective cause.
     “There’s a great deal being done here – a real vitality,” Nicholas Dormer went on, to his mother, in the same reasonable, informing way. “Some of these fellows go very far.”
     “They do, indeed!” said Lady Agnes.
     “I’m fond of young schools, like this movement in sculpture,” Nick remarked, with his slightly provoking serenity.
     “They’re old enough to know better!”
     “Mayn’t I look, mamma? It is necessary to my development,” Biddy declared.
     “You may do as you like,” said Lady Agnes, with dignity.
     “She ought to see good work, you know,” the young man went on.
     “I leave it to your sense of responsibility.” This statement was somewhat majestic, and for a moment, evidently, it tempted Nick, almost provoked him, or at any rate suggested to him an occasion to say something that he had on his mind. Apparently, however, he judged the occasion on the whole not good enough, and his sister Grace interposed with the inquiry –
     “Please, mamma, are we never going to lunch?”
     “Ah, mother, mother!” the young man murmured, in a troubled way, looking down at Lady Agnes with a deep fold in his forehead.
     For her, also, as she returned his look, it seemed an occasion; but with this difference, that she had no hesitation in taking advantage of it. She was encouraged by his slight embarrassment; for ordinarily Nick was not embarrassed. “You used to have so much,” she went on; “but sometimes I don’t know what has become of it – it seems all, all gone!”
     “Ah, mother, mother!” he exclaimed again, as if there were so many things to say that it was impossible to choose. But this time he stepped closer, bent over her, and, in spite of the publicity of their situation, gave her a quick, expressive kiss. The foreign observer whom I took for granted in beginning to sketch this scene would have had to admit that the rigid English family had, after all, a capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer, indeed, looked round her to see if at this moment they were noticed. She discovered with satisfaction that they had escaped.

     After her companions left her Lady Agnes rested for five minutes in silence with her elder daughter, at the end of which time she observed, “I suppose one must have food, at any rate,” and, getting up, quitted the place where they had been sitting. “And where are we to go? I hate eating out-of-doors,” she went on.
     “Dear me, when one comes to Paris!” Grace rejoined, in a tone which appeared to imply that in so rash an adventure one must be prepared for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered to where they saw a large sign of ‘Buffet’ suspended in the air, entering a precinct reserved for little white-clothed tables, straw-covered chairs and long-aproned waiters. One of these functionaries approached them with eagerness and with a “Mesdames sont seules?” receiving in return, from her ladyship, the slightly snappish announcement, “Non; nous sommes beaucoup!” He introduced them to a table larger than most of the others, and under his protection they took their places at it and began, rather languidly and vaguely, to consider the question of the repast. The waiter had placed a carte in Lady Agnes’s hands, and she studied it, through her eye-glass, with a failure of interest, while he enumerated, with professional fluency, the resources of the establishment and Grace looked at the people at the other tables. She was hungry and had already broken a morsel from a long glazed roll.
     “Not cold beef and pickles, you know,” she observed to her mother. Lady Agnes gave no heed to this profane remark, but she dropped her eye-glass and laid down the greasy document. “What does it signify? I dare say it’s all nasty,” Grace continued; and she added, inconsequently: “If Peter comes he’s sure to be particular.”
     “Let him be particular to come, first!” her ladyship exclaimed, turning a cold eye upon the waiter.
     “Poulet chasseur, filets mignons, sauce béarnaise,” the man suggested.
     “You will give us what I tell you,” said Lady Agnes, and she mentioned, with distinctness and authority, the dishes of which she desired that the meal should be composed. He interposed three or four more suggestions, but as they produced absolutely no impression on her he became silent and submissive, doing justice, apparently, to her ideas. For Lady Agnes had ideas; and though it had suited her humour, ten minutes before, to profess herself helpless in such a case, the manner in which she imposed them upon the waiter as original, practical and economical showed the high, executive woman, the mother of children, the daughter of earls, the consort of an official, the dispenser of hospitality, looking back upon a life-time of luncheons. She carried many cares, and the feeding of multitudes (she was honourably conscious of having fed them decently, as she had always done everything) had ever been one of them. “Everything is absurdly dear,” she hinted to her daughter, as the waiter went away. To this remark Grace made no answer. She had been used, for a long time back, to hearing that everything was very dear; it was what one always expected. So she found the case herself, but she was silent and inventive about it.
     Nothing further passed, in the way of conversation with her mother, while they waited for the latter’s orders to be executed, till Lady Agnes reflected, audibly: “He makes me unhappy, the way he talks about Julia!”
     “Sometimes I think he does it to torment one. One can’t mention her!” Grace responded.
     “It’s better not to mention her, but to leave it alone.”
     “Yet he never mentions her of himself.”
     “In some cases that is supposed to show that people like people – though of course something more than that is required,” Lady Agnes continued to meditate. “Sometimes I think he’s thinking of her; then at others I can’t fancy what he’s thinking of.”
     “It would be awfully suitable,” said Grace, biting her roll.
     Her mother was silent a moment, as if she were looking for some higher ground to put it upon. Then she appeared to find this loftier level in the observation: “Of course he must like her; he has known her always.”
     “Nothing can be plainer than that she likes him,” Grace declared.
     “Poor Julia!” Lady Agnes exclaimed; and her tone suggested that she knew more about that than she was ready to state.
     “It isn’t as if she wasn’t clever and well read,” her daughter went on. “If there were nothing else there would be a reason in her being so interested in politics, in everything that he is.”
     “Ah, what he is – that’s what I sometimes wonder!”
     Grace Dormer looked at her mother a moment. “Why, mother, isn’t he going to be like papa?” She waited for an answer that didn’t come; after which she pursued: “I thought you thought him so like him already.”
     “Well, I don’t,” said Lady Agnes, quietly.
     “Who is, then? Certainly Percy isn’t.”
     Lady Agnes was silent a moment. “There is no one like your father.”
     “Dear papa!” Grace exclaimed. Then, with a rapid transition: “It would be so jolly for all of us; she would be so nice to us.”
     “She is that already, in her way,” said Lady Agnes, conscientiously, having followed the return, quick as it was. “Much good does it do her!” And she reproduced the note of her ejaculation of a moment before.
     “It does her some, if one looks out for her. I do, and I think she knows it,” Grace declared. “One can, at any rate, keep other women off.”
     “Don’t meddle! you’re very clumsy,” was her mother’s not particularly sympathetic rejoinder. “There are other women who are beautiful, and there are others who are clever and rich.”
     “Yes, but not all in one; that’s what’s so nice in Julia. Her fortune would be thrown in; he wouldn’t appear to have married her for it.”
     “If he does, he won’t,” said Lady Agnes, a trifle obscurely.
     “Yes, that’s what’s so charming. And he could do anything then, couldn’t he?”
     “Well, your father had no fortune, to speak of.”
     “Yes, but didn’t Uncle Percy help him?”
     “His wife helped him,” said Lady Agnes.
     “Dear mamma!” the girl exclaimed. “There’s one thing,” she added: “that Mr Carteret will always help Nick.”
     “What do you mean by ‘always’?”
     “Why, whether he marries Julia or not.”
     “Things are not so easy,” responded Lady Agnes. “It will all depend on Nick’s behaviour. He can stop it to-morrow.”
     Grace Dormer stared; she evidently thought Mr Carteret’s beneficence a part of the scheme of nature. “How could he stop it?”
     “By not being serious. It isn’t so hard to prevent people giving you money.”
     “Serious?” Grace repeated. “Does he want him to be a prig, like Lord Egbert?”
     “Yes, he does. And what he’ll do for him he’ll do for him only if he marries Julia.”
     “Has he told you?” Grace inquired. And then, before her mother could answer, she exclaimed: “I’m delighted at that!”
     “He hasn’t told me, but that’s the way things happen.” Lady Agnes was less optimistic than her daughter, and such optimism as she cultivated was a thin tissue, with a sense of things as they are showing through it. “If Nick becomes rich, Charles Carteret will make him more so. If he doesn’t, he won’t give him a shilling.”
     “Oh, mamma!” Grace protested.
     “It’s all very well to say that in public life money isn’t necessary, as it used to be,” her ladyship went on, broodingly. “Those who say so don’t know anything about it. It’s always necessary.”
     Her daughter was visibly affected by the gloom of her manner, and felt impelled to evoke, as a corrective, a more cheerful idea. “I dare say; but there’s the fact – isn’t there? – that poor papa had so little.”
     “Yes, and there’s the fact that it killed him!”
     These words came out with a strange, quick little flare of passion. They startled Grace Dormer, who jumped in her place and cried, “Oh, mother!” The next instant, however, she added, in a different voice, “Oh, Peter!” for, with an air of eagerness, a gentleman was walking up to them.
     “How d’ye do, Cousin Agnes? How d’ye do, little Grace?” Peter Sherringham said, laughing and shaking hands with them; and three minutes later he was settled in his chair at their table, on which the first elements of the repast had been placed. Explanations, on one side and the other, were demanded and produced; from which it appeared that the two parties had been in some degree at cross-purposes. The day before Lady Agnes and her companions travelled to Paris, Sherringham had gone to London for forty-eight hours, on private business of the ambassador’s, arriving, on his return by the night-train, only early that morning. There had accordingly been a delay in his receiving Nick Dormer’s two notes. If Nick had come to the Embassy in person (he might have done him the honour to call), he would have learned that the second secretary was absent. Lady Agnes was not altogether successful in assigning a motive to her son’s neglect of this courteous form; she said: “I expected him, I wanted him, to go; and indeed, not hearing from you, he would have gone immediately – an hour or two hence, on leaving this place. But we are here so quietly, not to go out, not to seem to appeal to the ambassador. He said, ‘Oh, mother, we’ll keep out of it; a friendly note will do.’ I don’t know, definitely, what he wanted to keep out of, except it’s anything like gaiety. The Embassy isn’t gay, I know. But I’m sure his note was friendly, wasn’t it? I dare say you’ll see for yourself; he’s different directly he gets abroad; he doesn’t seem to care.” Lady Agnes paused a moment, not carrying out this particular elucidation; then she resumed: “He said you would have seen Julia and that you would understand everything from her. And when I asked how she would know, he said, ‘Oh, she knows everything!’”
     “He never said a word to me about Julia,” Peter Sherringham rejoined. Lady Agnes and her daughter exchanged a glance at this; the latter had already asked three times where Julia was, and her ladyship dropped that they had been hoping she would be able to come with Peter. The young man set forth that she was at that moment at an hotel in the Rue de la Paix, but had only been there since that morning: he had seen her before coming to the Champs Elysées. She had come up to Paris by an early train – she had been staying at Versailles, of all places in the world. She had been a week in Paris, on her return from Cannes (her stay there had been of nearly a month – fancy!) and then had gone out to Versailles to see Mrs Billinghurst. Perhaps they would remember her, poor Dallow’s sister. She was staying there to teach her daughters French (she had a dozen or two!) and Julia had spent three days with her. She was to return to England about the 25th. It would make seven weeks that she would have been away from town – a rare thing for her; she usually stuck to it so in summer.
     “Three days with Mrs Billinghurst – how very good-natured of her!” Lady Agnes commented.
     “Oh, they’re very nice to her,” Sherringham said.
     “Well, I hope so!” Grace Dormer qualified. “Why didn’t you make her come here?”
     “I proposed it, but she wouldn’t.” Another eye-beam, at this, passed between the two ladies, and Peter went on: “She said you must come and see her, at the Hôtel de Hollande.”
     “Of course we’ll do that,” Lady Agnes declared. “Nick went to ask about her at the Westminster.”
     “She gave that up; they wouldn’t give her the rooms she wanted, her usual set.”
     “She’s delightfully particular!” Grace murmured. Then she added: “She does like pictures, doesn’t she?”
     Peter Sherringham stared. “Oh, I dare say. But that’s not what she has in her head this morning. She has some news from London; she’s immensely excited.”
     “What has she in her head?” Lady Agnes asked.
     “What’s her news from London?” Grace demanded.
     “She wants Nick to stand.”
     “Nick to stand?” both the ladies cried.
     “She undertakes to bring him in for Harsh. Mr Pinks is dead – the fellow, you know, that got the seat at the general election. He dropped down in London – disease of the heart, or something of that sort. Julia has her telegram, but I see it was in last night’s papers.”
     “Imagine, Nick never mentioned it!” said Lady Agnes.
     “Don’t you know, mother? – abroad he only reads foreign papers.”
     “Oh, I know. I’ve no patience with him,” her ladyship continued. “Dear Julia!”
     “It’s a nasty little place, and Pinks had a tight squeeze – 107, or something of that sort; but if it returned a Liberal a year ago, very likely it will do so again. Julia, at any rate, se fait forte, as they say here, to put him in.”
     “I’m sure if she can she will,” Grace reflected.
     “Dear, dear Julia! And Nick can do something for himself,” said the mother of this candidate.
     “I have no doubt he can do anything,” Peter Sherringham returned, good-naturedly. Then, “Do you mean in expenses?” he inquired.
     “Ah, I’m afraid he can’t do much in expenses, poor dear boy! And it’s dreadful how little we can look to Percy.”
     “Well, I dare say you may look to Julia. I think that’s her idea.”
     “Delightful Julia!” Lady Agnes ejaculated. “If poor Sir Nicholas could have known! Of course he must go straight home,” she added.
     “He won’t like that,” said Grace.
     “Then he’ll have to go without liking it.”
     “It will rather spoil your little excursion, if you’ve only just come,” Peter suggested; “and the great Biddy’s, if she’s enjoying Paris.”
     “We may stay, perhaps – with Julia to protect us,” said Lady Agnes.
     “Ah, she won’t stay; she’ll go over for her man.”
     “Her man?”
     “The fellow that stands, whoever he is; especially if he’s Nick.” These last words caused the eyes of Peter Sherringham’s companions to meet again, and he went on: “She’ll go straight down to Harsh.”
     “Wonderful Julia!” Lady Agnes panted. “Of course Nick must go straight there, too.”
     “Well, I suppose he must see first if they’ll have him.”
     “If they’ll have him? Why, how can he tell till he tries?”
     “I mean the people at headquarters, the fellows who arrange it.”
     Lady Agnes coloured a little. “My dear Peter, do you suppose there will be the least doubt of their ‘having’ the son of his father?”
     “Of course it’s a great name, Cousin Agnes – a very great name.”
     “One of the greatest, simply,” said Lady Agnes, smiling.
     “It’s the best name in the world!” Grace Dormer subjoined.
     “All the same it didn’t prevent his losing his seat.”
     “By half a dozen votes: it was too odious!” her ladyship cried.
     “I remember – I remember. And in such a case as that why didn’t they immediately put him in somewhere else?”
     “How one sees that you live abroad, Peter! There happens to have been the most extraordinary lack of openings – I never saw anything like it – for a year. They’ve had their hand on him, keeping him all ready. I dare say they’ve telegraphed to him.”
     “And he hasn’t told you?”
     Lady Agnes hesitated. “He’s so odd when he’s abroad!”
     “At home, too, he lets things go,” Grace interposed. “He does so little – takes no trouble.” Her mother suffered this statement to pass unchallenged, and she pursued, philosophically: “I suppose it’s because he know’s he’s so clever.”
     “So he is, dear old boy. But what does he do, what has he been doing, in a positive way?”
     “He has been painting.”
     “Ah, not seriously!” Lady Agnes protested.
     “That’s the worst way,” said Peter Sherringham. “Good things?”
     Neither of the ladies made a direct response to this, but Lady Agnes said: “He has spoken repeatedly. They are always calling on him.”
     “He speaks magnificently,” Grace attested.
     “That’s another of the things I lose, living in far countries. And he’s doing the Salon now, with the great Biddy?”
     “Just the things in this part. I can’t think what keeps them so long,” Lady Agnes rejoined. “Did you ever see such a dreadful place?”
     Sherringham stared. “Aren’t the things good? I had an idea—”
     “Good?” cried Lady Agnes. “They’re too odious, too wicked.”
     “Ah,” said Peter, laughing, “that’s what people fall into, if they live abroad. The French oughtn’t to live abroad.”
     “Here they come,” Grace announced, at this point; “but they’ve got a strange man with them.”
     “That’s a bore, when we want to talk!” Lady Agnes sighed.
     Peter got up, in the spirit of welcome, and stood a moment watching the others approach. “There will be no difficulty in talking, to judge by the gentleman,” he suggested; and while he remains so conspicuous our eyes may rest on him briefly. He was middling high and was visibly a representative of the nervous rather than of the phlegmatic branch of his race. He had an oval face, fine, firm features and a complexion that tended to the brown. Brown were his eyes, and women thought them soft; dark brown his hair, in which the same critics sometime regretted the absence of a little undulation. It was perhaps to conceal this plainness that he wore it very short. His teeth were white; his moustache was pointed, and so was the small beard that adorned the extremity of his chin. His face expressed intelligence and was very much alive, and had the further distinction that it often struck superficial observers with a certain foreignness of cast. The deeper sort, however, usually perceived that it was English enough. There was an idea that, having taken up the diplomatic career and gone to live in strange lands, he cultivated the mask of an alien, an Italian or a Spaniard; of an alien in time, even – one of the wonderful ubiquitous diplomatic agents of the sixteenth century. In fact, it would have been impossible to be more modern than Peter Sherringham, and more of one’s class and one’s country. But this did not prevent a portion of the community – Bridget Dormer, for instance – from admiring the hue of his cheek for its olive richness and his moustache and beard for their resemblance to those of Charles I. At the same time – she rather jumbled her comparisons – she thought he looked like a Titian.

     At Peter Sherringham’s, the next day, Miriam Rooth had so evidently come with the expectation of ‘saying’ something that it was impossible such a patron of the drama should forbear to invite her, little as the exhibition at Madame Carré’s could have contributed to render the invitation prompt. His curiosity had been more appeased than stimulated, but he felt none the less that he had ‘taken up’ the dark-browed girl and her reminiscential mother and must face the immediate consequences of the act. This responsibility weighed upon him during the twenty-four hours that followed the ultimate dispersal of the little party at the door of the Hôtel de la Garonne.
     On quitting Madame Carré’s the two ladies had gracefully declined Mr Nash’s offered cab and had taken their way homeward on foot, with the gentlemen in attendance. The streets of Paris at that hour were bright and episodical, and Sherringham trod them good-humouredly enough, and not too fast, leaning a little to talk to the young lady as he went. Their pace was regulated by the mother’s, who walked in advance, on the arm of Gabriel Nash (Nick Dormer was on her other side), in refined deprecation. Her sloping back was before them, exempt from retentive stiffness in spite of her rigid principles, with the little drama of her lost and recovered shawl perpetually going on.
     Sherringham said nothing to the girl about her performance or her powers; their talk was only of her manner of life with her mother – their travels, their pensions, their economies, their want of a home, the many cities she knew well, the foreign tongues and the wide view of the world she had acquired. He guessed easily enough the dolorous type of exile of the two ladies, wanderers in search of Continental cheapness, inured to queer contacts and compromises, ‘remarkably well connected’ in England, but going out for their meals. The girl was but indirectly communicative, not, apparently, from any intention of concealment, but from the habit of associating with people whom she didn’t honour with her confidence. She was fragmentary and abrupt, as well as not in the least shy, subdued to dread of Madame Carré as she had been for the time. She gave Sherringham a reason for this fear, and he thought her reason innocently pretentious. “She admired a great artist more than anything in the world; and in the presence of art, of great art, her heart beat so fast.” Her manners were not perfect, and the friction of a varied experience had rather roughened than smoothed her. She said nothing that showed that she was clever, though he guessed that this was the intention of two or three of her remarks; but he parted from her with the suspicion that she was, according to the contemporary French phrase, a ‘nature’.
     The Hôtel de la Garonne was in a small, unrenovated street, in which the cobble-stones of old Paris still flourished, lying between the Avenue de l’Opéra and the Place de la Bourse. Sherringham had occasionally passed through this dim by-way, but he had never noticed the tall, stale maison meublée, whose aspect, that of a third-rate provincial inn, was an illustration of Mrs Rooth’s shrunken standard.
     “We would ask you to come up, but it’s quite at the top and we haven’t a sitting-room,” the poor lady bravely explained. “We had to receive Mr Nash at a café.”
     Nick Dormer declared that he liked cafés, and Miriam, looking at his cousin, dropped with a flash of passion the demand: “Do you wonder that I should want to do something, so that we can stop living like pigs?”
     Sherringham recognized eventually, the next day, that though it might be rather painful to listen to her it was better to make her recite than to let her do nothing, so effectually did the presence of his sister and that of Lady Agnes, and even of Grace and Biddy, appear, by a sort of tacit opposition, to deprive hers, ornamental as it was, of a reason. He had only to see them all together to perceive that she couldn’t pass for having come to ‘meet’ them – even her mother’s insinuating gentility failed to put the occasion on that footing – and that she must therefore be assumed to have been brought to show them something. She was not subdued nor colourless enough to sit there for nothing, or even for conversation (the sort of conversation that was likely to come off), so that it was inevitable to treat her position as connected with the principal place on the carpet, with silence and attention and the pulling together of chairs. Even when so established it struck him at first as precarious, in the light or the darkness of the inexpressive faces of the other ladies, sitting in couples and rows on sofas (there were several in addition to Julia and the Dormers; mainly the wives, with their husbands, of Sherringham’s fellow-secretaries), scarcely one of whom he felt that he might count upon to say something gushing when the girl should have finished.
     Miss Rooth gave a representation of Juliet drinking her potion, according to the system, as her mother explained, of the famous Signor Ruggieri – a scene of high, fierce sound, of many cries and contortions: she shook her hair (which proved magnificent) half down before the performance was over. Then she declaimed several short poems by Victor Hugo, selected, among many hundred, by Mrs Rooth, as the good lady was careful to make known. After this she jumped to the American lyre, regaling the company with specimens, both familiar and fresh, of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, and of two or three poetesses revealed to Sherringham on this occasion. She flowed so copiously, keeping the floor and rejoicing visibly in her opportunity, that Sherringham was mainly occupied with wondering how he could make her leave off. He was surprised at the extent of her repertory, which, in view of the circumstance that she could never have received much encouragement – it must have come mainly from her mother, and he didn’t believe in Signor Ruggieri – denoted a very stiff ambition and a kind of misplaced perseverance. It was her mother who checked her at last, and he found himself suspecting that Gabriel Nash had intimated to the old woman that interference was necessary. For himself he was chiefly glad that Madame Carré was not there. It was present to him that she would have deemed the exhibition, with its badness, its assurance, the absence of criticism, almost indecent.
     His only new impression of the girl was that of this same high assurance – her coolness, her complacency, her eagerness to go on. She had been deadly afraid of the old actress, but she was not a bit afraid of a cluster of femmes du monde, of Julia, of Lady Agnes, of the smart women of the Embassy. It was positively these personages who were rather frightened; there was certainly a moment when even Julia was scared, for the first time that he had ever seen her. The space was too small; the cries, the rushes of the dishevelled girl were too near. Lady Agnes, much of the time, wore the countenance she might have worn at the theatre during a play in which pistols were fired; and indeed the manner of the young reciter had become more spasmodic, more explosive. It appeared, however, that the company in general thought her very clever and successful; which showed, to Sherringham’s sense, how little they understood the matter. Poor Biddy was immensely struck, and grew flushed and absorbed as Miriam, at her best moments, became pale and fatal. It was she who spoke to her first, after it was agreed that they had better not fatigue her any more; she advanced a few steps, happening to be near her, murmuring: “Oh, thank you, thank you so much. I never saw anything so beautiful, so grand.”
     She looked very red and very pretty as she said this. Peter Sherringham liked her enough to notice and to like her better when she looked prettier than usual. As he turned away he heard Miriam answer, with rather an ungracious irrelevance: “I have seen you before, three days ago, at the Salon, with Mr Dormer. Yes, I know he’s your brother. I have made his acquaintance since. He wants to paint my portrait. Do you think he’ll do it well?” He was afraid Miriam was something of a brute, and also somewhat grossly vain. This impression would perhaps have been confirmed if a part of the rest of the short conversation of the two girls had reached his ear. Biddy ventured to remark that she herself had studied modelling a little and that she could understand how any artist would think Miss Rooth a splendid subject. If, indeed, she could attempt her head, that would be a chance to do something.
     “Thank you,” said Miriam, with a laugh. “I think I had rather not passer par toute la famille!” Then she added: “If your brother’s an artist, I don’t understand how he’s in Parliament.”
     “Oh, he isn’t in Parliament now; we only hope he will be.”
     “Oh, I see.”
     “And he isn’t an artist, either,” Biddy felt herself conscientiously bound to subjoin.
     “Then he isn’t anything,” said Miss Rooth.
     “Well – he’s immensely clever.”
     “Oh, I see,” Miss Rooth again replied. “Mr Nash has puffed him up so.”
     “I don’t know Mr Nash,” said Biddy, guilty of a little dryness, and also of a little misrepresentation, and feeling rather snubbed.
     “Well, you needn’t wish to.”
     Biddy stood with her a moment longer, still looking at her and not knowing what to say next, but not finding her any less handsome because she had such odd manners. Biddy had an ingenious little mind, which always tried as much as possible to keep different things separate. It was pervaded now by the observation, made with a certain relief, that if the girl spoke to her with such unexpected familiarity of Nick she said nothing at all about Peter. Two gentlemen came up, two of Peter’s friends, and made speeches to Miss Rooth of the kind, Biddy supposed, that people learned to make in Paris. It was also doubtless in Paris, the girl privately reasoned, that they learned to listen to them as this striking performer listened. She received their advances very differently from the way she had received Biddy’s. Sherringham noticed his young kinswoman turn away, still blushing, to go and sit near her mother again, leaving Miriam engaged with the two men. It appeared to have come over Biddy that for a moment she had been strangely spontaneous and bold and had paid a little of the penalty. The seat next her mother was occupied by Mrs Rooth, toward whom Lady Agnes’s head had inclined itself with a preoccupied air of benevolence. He had an idea that Mrs Rooth was telling her about the Neville-Nugents of Castle Nugent, and that Lady Agnes was thinking it odd she never had heard of them. He said to himself that Biddy was generous. She had urged Julia to come, in order that they might see how bad the strange young woman would be; but now that she turned out so dazzling she forgot this calculation and rejoiced in what she innocently supposed to be her triumph. She kept away from Julia, however; she didn’t even look at her to invite her also to confess that, in vulgar parlance, they had been sold. He himself spoke to his sister, who was leaning back, in rather a detached way, in the corner of a sofa, saying something which led her to remark in reply: “Ah, I dare say it’s extremely fine, but I don’t care for tragedy when it treads on one’s toes. She’s like a cow who has kicked over the milking-pail. She ought to be tied up!”
     “My poor Julia, it isn’t extremely fine; it isn’t fine at all,” Sherringham rejoined, with some irritation.
     “Excuse me. I thought that was why you invited us.”
     “I thought she was different,” Sherringham said.
     “Ah, if you don’t care for her, so much the better. It has always seemed to me that you make too much of those people.”
     “Oh, I do care for her in a way, too. She’s interesting.” His sister gave him a momentary mystified glance, and he added, “And she’s awful!” He felt stupidly annoyed, and he was ashamed of his annoyance, for he could have assigned no reason for it. It didn’t make it less, for the moment, to see Gabriel Nash approach Mrs Dallow, introduced by Nick Dormer. He gave place to the two young men with a certain alacrity, for he had a sense of being put in the wrong, in respect to the heroine of the occasion, by Nash’s very presence. He remembered that it had been part of their bargain, as it were, that he should present that gentleman to his sister. He was not sorry to be relieved of the office by Nick, and he even, tacitly and ironically, wished his cousin’s friend joy of a colloquy with Mrs Dallow. Sherringham’s life was spent with people, he was used to people, and both as a host and as a guest he carried them, in general, lightly. He could observe, especially in the former capacity, without uneasiness, take the temperature without anxiety. But at present his company oppressed him; he felt himself nervous, which was the thing in the world that he had always held to be least an honour to a gentleman dedicated to diplomacy. He was vexed with the levity in himself which had made him call them together on so poor a pretext, and yet he was vexed with the stupidity in them which made them think, as they evidently did, that the pretext was sufficient. He inwardly groaned at the precipitancy with which he had saddled himself with the Tragic Muse (a tragic muse who was noisy and pert), and yet he wished his visitors would go away and leave him alone with her.
     Nick Dormer said to Mrs Dallow that he wanted her to know an old friend of his, one of the cleverest men he knew; and he added the hope that she would be gentle and encouraging with him: he was so timid and so easily disconcerted.
     Gabriel Nash dropped into a chair by the arm of Julia’s sofa, Nick Dormer went away, and Mrs Dallow turned her glance upon her new acquaintance without a perceptible change of position. Then she emitted, with rapidity, the remark: “It’s very awkward when people are told one is clever.”
     “It’s awkward if one isn’t,” said Mr Nash, smiling.
     “Yes, but so few people are – enough to be talked about.”
     “Isn’t that just the reason why such a matter, such an exception, ought to be mentioned to them?” asked Gabriel Nash. “They mightn’t find it out for themselves. Of course, however, as you say, there ought to be a certainty; then they are surer to know it. Dormer’s a dear fellow, but he’s rash and superficial.”
     Mrs Dallow, at this, turned her glance a second time upon her interlocutor; but during the rest of the conversation she rarely repeated the movement. If she liked Nick Dormer extremely (and it may without further delay be communicated to the reader that she did), her liking was of a kind that opposed no difficulty whatever to her not liking (in case of such a complication) a person attached or otherwise belonging to him. It was not in her nature to extend tolerances to others for the sake of an individual she loved: the tolerance was usually consumed in the loving; there was nothing left over. If the affection that isolates and simplifies its object may be distinguished from the affection that seeks communications and contacts for it, Julia Dallow’s belonged wholly to the former class. She was not so much jealous as rigidly direct. She desired no experience for the familiar and yet partly mysterious kinsman in whom she took an interest that she would not have desired for herself; and, indeed, the cause of her interest in him was partly the vision of his helping her to the particular emotion that she did desire – the emotion of great affairs and of public action. To have such ambitions for him appeared to her the greatest honour she could do him; her conscience was in it as well as her inclination, and her scheme, in her conception, was noble enough to varnish over any disdain she might feel for forces drawing him another way. She had a prejudice, in general, against his connections, a suspicion of them and a supply of unwrought contempt ready for them. It was a singular circumstance that she was sceptical even when, knowing her as well as he did, he thought them worth recommending to her: the recommendation indeed inveterately confirmed the suspicion.
     This was a law from which Gabriel Nash was condemned to suffer, if suffering could on any occasion be predicated of Gabriel Nash. His pretension was, in truth, that he had purged his life of such incongruities, though probably he would have admitted that if a sore spot remained the hand of a woman would be sure to touch it. In dining with her brother and with the Dormers, two evenings before, Mrs Dallow had been moved to exclaim that Peter and Nick knew the most extraordinary people. As regards Peter the attitudinizing girl and her mother now pointed that moral with sufficient vividness; so that there was little arrogance in taking a similar quality for granted in the conceited man at her elbow, who sat there as if he would be capable, from one moment to another, of leaning over the arm of her sofa. She had not the slightest wish to talk with him about himself, and was afraid, for an instant, that he was on the point of passing from the chapter of his cleverness to that of his timidity. It was a false alarm, however, for instead of this he said something about the pleasures of the monologue, as the distraction that had just been offered was called by the French. He intimated that in his opinion these pleasures were mainly for the performers. They had all, at any rate, given Miss Rooth a charming afternoon; that, of course, was what Mrs Dallow’s kind brother had mainly intended in arranging the little party. (Mrs Dallow hated to hear him call her brother ‘kind’; the term seemed offensively patronizing.) But he himself, he related, was now constantly employed in the same beneficence, listening, two-thirds of his time, to ‘intonations’ and shrieks. She had doubtless observed it herself, how the great current of the age, the adoration of the mime, was almost too strong for any individual; how it swept one along and hurled one against the rocks. As she made no response to this proposition Gabriel Nash asked her if she had not been struck with the main sign of the time, the preponderance of the mountebank, the glory and renown, the personal favour, that he enjoyed. Hadn’t she noticed what an immense part of the public attention he held, in London at least? For in Paris society was not so pervaded with him, and the women of the profession, in particular, were not in every drawing-room.
     “I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs Dallow said. “I know nothing of any such people.”
     “Aren’t they under your feet wherever you turn – their performances, their portraits, their speeches, their autobiographies, their names, their manners, their ugly mugs, as the people say, and their idiotic pretensions?”
     “I dare say it depends on the places one goes to. If they’re everywhere” – and Mrs Dallow paused a moment – “I don’t go everywhere.”
     “I don’t go anywhere, but they mount on my back, at home, like the Old Man of the Sea. Just observe a little when you return to London,” Nash continued, with friendly instructiveness. Mrs Dallow got up at this – she didn’t like receiving directions; but no other corner of the room appeared to offer her any particular reason for crossing to it: she never did such a thing without a great inducement. So she remained standing there, as if she were quitting the place in a moment, which indeed she now determined to do; and her interlocutor, rising also, lingered beside her, unencouraged but unperturbed. He went on to remark that Mr Sherringham was quite right to offer Miss Rooth an afternoon’s sport; she deserved it as a fine, brave, amiable girl. She was highly educated, knew a dozen languages, was of illustrious lineage and was immensely particular.
     “Immensely particular?” Mrs Dallow repeated.
     “Perhaps I should say that her mother is, on her behalf. Particular about the sort of people they meet – the tone, the standard. I’m bound to say they’re like you: they don’t go everywhere. That spirit is meritorious; it should be recognized and rewarded.”
     Mrs Dallow said nothing for a moment; she looked vaguely round the room, but not at Miriam Rooth. Nevertheless she presently dropped, in allusion to her, the words: “She’s dreadfully vulgar.”
     “Ah, don’t say that to my friend Dormer!” Gabriel Nash exclaimed.
     “Are you and he such great friends?” Mrs Dallow asked, looking at him.
     “Great enough to make me hope we shall be greater.”
     Again, for a moment, she said nothing; then she went on –
     “Why shouldn’t I say to him that she’s vulgar?”
     “Because he admires her so much; he wants to paint her.”
     “To paint her?”
     “To paint her portrait.”
     “Oh, I see. I dare say she’d do for that.”
     Gabriel Nash laughed gaily. “If that’s your opinion of her you are not very complimentary to the art he aspires to practise.”
     “He aspires to practise?” Mrs Dallow repeated.
     “Haven’t you talked with him about it? Ah, you must keep him up to it!”
     Julia Dallow was conscious, for a moment, of looking uncomfortable; but it relieved her to demand of her neighbour, in a certain tone, “Are you an artist?”
     “I try to be,” Nash replied, smiling; “but I work in such a difficult material.”
     He spoke this with such a clever suggestion of unexpected reference that, in spite of herself, Mrs Dallow said after him –
     “Difficult material?”
     “I work in life!”
     At this Mrs Dallow turned away, leaving Nash the impression that she probably misunderstood his speech, thinking he meant that he drew from the living model, or some such platitude: as if there could have been any likelihood that he drew from the dead one. This, indeed, would not fully have explained the abruptness with which she dropped their conversation. Gabriel Nash, however, was used to sudden collapses, and even to sudden ruptures, on the part of his interlocutors, and no man had more the secret of remaining gracefully with his ideas on his hands. He saw Mrs Dallow approach Nick Dormer, who was talking with one of the ladies of the Embassy, and apparently signify to him that she wished to speak to him. He got up, they had a minute’s conversation, and then he turned and took leave of his fellow-visitor. Mrs Dallow said a word to her brother, Dormer joined her, and then they came together to the door. In this movement they had to pass near Nash, and it gave her an opportunity to nod good-bye to him, which he was by no means sure she would have done if Nick had not been with her. The young man stopped a moment; he said to Nash: “I should like to see you this evening, late; you must meet me somewhere.”
     “We’ll take a walk – I should like that,” Nash replied. “I shall smoke a cigar at the café on the corner of the Place de l’Opéra; you’ll find me there.” Gabriel prepared to compass his own departure, but before doing so he addressed himself to the duty of saying a few words of civility to Lady Agnes. This proved difficult, for on one side she was defended by the wall of the room and on the other rendered inaccessible by Miriam’s mother, who clung to her with a quickly-rooted fidelity, showing no symptom of desistance. Gabriel compromised on her daughter Grace, who said to him:
     “You were talking with my cousin, Mrs Dallow.”
     “To her rather than with her,” Nash smiled.
     “Ah, she’s very charming,” said Grace.
     “She’s very beautiful,” Nash rejoined.
     “And very clever,” Miss Dormer continued.
     “Very, very intelligent.” His conversation with the young lady went little further than this, and he presently took leave of Peter Sherringham; remarking to him, as he shook hands, that he was very sorry for him. But he had courted his fate.
     “What do you mean by my fate?” Sherringham asked.
     “You’ve got them for life.”
     “Why for life, when I now lucidly and courageously recognize that she isn’t good?”
     “Ah, but she’ll become so,” said Gabriel Nash.
     “Do you think that?” Sherringham inquired, with a candour which made his visitor laugh.
     “You will – that’s more to the purpose!” Gabriel exclaimed, as he went away.
     Ten minutes later Lady Agnes substituted a general vague assent to all further particular ones and, with her daughters, withdrew from Mrs Rooth and from the rest of the company. Peter had had very little talk with Biddy, but the girl kept her disappointment out of her pretty eyes and said to him:
     “You told us she didn’t know how – but she does!” There was no suggestion of disappointment in this.
     Sherringham held her hand a moment. “Ah, it’s you who know how, dear Biddy!” he answered; and he was conscious that if the occasion had been more private he would lawfully have kissed her.
     Presently three others of his guests departed, and Mr Nash’s assurance that he had them for life recurred to him as he observed that Mrs Rooth and her daughter quite failed to profit by so many examples. The Lovicks remained – a colleague and his sociable wife – and Peter gave them a hint that they were not to leave him absolutely alone with the two ladies. Miriam quitted Mrs Lovick, who had attempted, with no great subtlety, to engage her, and came up to Sherringham as if she suspected him of a design of stealing from the room and had the idea of preventing it.
     “I want some more tea: will you give me some more? I feel quite faint. You don’t seem to suspect how that sort of thing takes it out of you.”
     Sherringham apologized, extravagantly, for not having seen that she had the proper quantity of refreshment, and took her to the round table, in a corner, on which the little collation had been served. He poured out tea for her and pressed bread-and-butter on her, and petits fours, of all which she profusely and methodically partook. It was late; the afternoon had faded and a lamp had been brought in, the wide shade of which shed a fair glow upon the tea-service, the little plates of comestibles. The Lovicks sat with Mrs Rooth at the other end of the room, and the girl stood at the table drinking her tea and eating her bread-and-butter. She consumed these articles so freely that he wondered if she had been in serious want of food – if they were so poor as to have to count with that sort of privation. This supposition was softening, but still not so much so as to make him ask her to sit down. She appeared indeed to prefer to stand: she looked better so, as if the freedom, the conspicuity of being on her feet and treading a stage were agreeable to her. While Sherringham lingered near her, vaguely, with his hands in his pockets, not knowing exactly what to say and instinctively avoiding, now, the theatrical question (there were moments when he was plentifully tired of it), she broke out abruptly: “Confess that you think me intolerably bad!”
     “Intolerably – no.”
     “Only tolerably! I think that’s worse.”
     “Every now and then you do something very clever,” Sherringham said.
     “How many such things did I do to-day?”
     “Oh, three or four. I don’t know that I counted very carefully.”
     She raised her cup to her lips, looking at him over the rim of it – a proceeding which gave her eyes a strange expression. “It bores you, and you think it disagreeable,” she said in a moment – “a girl always talking about herself.” He protested that she could never bore him, and she went on: “Oh, I don’t want compliments – I want the truth. An actress has to talk about herself; what else can she talk about, poor vain thing?”
     “She can talk sometimes about other actresses.”
     “That comes to the same thing. You won’t be serious. I’m awfully serious.” There was something that caught his attention in the way she said this – a longing, half-hopeless, half-argumentative, to be believed in. “If one really wants to do anything one must worry it out; of course everything doesn’t come the first day,” she pursued. “I can’t see everything at once; but I can see a little more – step by step – as I go: can’t I?”
     “That’s the way – that’s the way,” said Sherringham. “If you see the things to do, the art of doing them will come, if you hammer away. The great point is to see them.”
     “Yes; and you don’t think me clever enough for that.”
     “Why do you say so, when I’ve asked you to come here on purpose?”
     “You’ve asked me to come, but I’ve had no success.”
     “On the contrary; every one thought you wonderful.”
     “Oh, they don’t know!” said Miriam Rooth. “You’ve not said a word to me. I don’t mind your not having praised me; that would be too banal. But if I’m bad – and I know I’m dreadful – I wish you would talk to me about it.”
     “It’s delightful to talk to you,” Sherringham said.
     “No, it isn’t, but it’s kind,” she answered, looking away from him.
     Her voice had a quality, as she uttered these words, which made him exclaim. “Every now and then you say something—!”
     She turned her eyes back to him, smiling. “I don’t want it to come by accident.” Then she added: “If there’s any good to be got from trying, from showing one’s self, how can it come unless one hears the simple truth, the truth that turns one inside out? It’s all for that – to know what one is, if one’s a stick!”
     “You have great courage, you have rare qualities,” said Sherringham. She had begun to touch him, to seem different: he was glad she had not gone.
     For a moment she made no response to this, putting down her empty cup and looking vaguely over the table, as if to select something more to eat. Suddenly she raised her head and broke out with vehemence: “I will, I will, I will!”
     “You’ll do what you want, evidently.”
     “I will succeed – I will be great. Of course I know too little, I’ve seen too little. But I’ve always liked it; I’ve never liked anything else. I used to learn things, and to do scenes, and to rant about the room, when I was five years old.” She went on, communicative, persuasive, familiar, egotistical (as was necessary), and slightly common, or perhaps only natural; with reminiscences, reasons and anecdotes, an unexpected profusion, and with an air of comradeship, of freedom of intercourse, which appeared to plead that she was capable at least of embracing that side of the profession she desired to adopt. He perceived that if she had seen very little, as she said, she had also seen a great deal; but both her experience and her innocence had been accidental and irregular. She had seen very little acting – the theatre was always too expensive. If she could only go often – in Paris, for instance, every night for six months – to see the best, the worst, everything, she would make things out, she would observe and learn what to do, what not to do: it would be a kind of school. But she couldn’t, without selling the clothes off her back. It was vile and disgusting to be poor; and if ever she were to know the bliss of having a few francs in her pocket she would make up for it – that she could promise! She had never been acquainted with any one who could tell her anything – if it was good or bad, right or wrong – except Mrs Delamere and poor Ruggieri. She supposed they had told her a great deal, but perhaps they hadn’t, and she was perfectly willing to give it up if it was bad. Evidently Madame Carré thought so; she thought it was horrid. Wasn’t it perfectly divine, the way the old woman had said those verses, those speeches of Célie? If she would only let her come and listen to her once in a while, like that, it was all she would ask. She had got lots of ideas, just from that; she had practised them over, over and over again, the moment she got home. He might ask her mother – he might ask the people next door. If Madame Carré didn’t think she could work she might have heard something that would show her. But she didn’t think her even good enough to criticize; for that wasn’t criticism, telling her her head was good. Of course her head was good; she didn’t need travel up to the quartiers excentriques to find that out. It was her mother – the way she talked – who gave that idea, that she wanted to be elegant, and very moral, and a femme du monde, and all that sort of trash. Of course that put people off, when they were only thinking of the right way. Didn’t she know, Miriam herself, that that was the only thing to think of? But any one would be kind to her mother who knew what a dear she was. “She doesn’t know when it’s right or wrong, but she’s a perfect saint,” said the girl, obscuring considerably her vindication. “She doesn’t mind when I say things over by the hour, dinning them into her ears while she sits there and reads. She’s a tremendous reader; she’s awfully up in literature. She taught me everything herself – I mean all that sort of thing. Of course I’m not so fond of reading; I go in for the book of life.” Sherringham wondered whether her mother had not, at any rate, taught her that phrase, and thought it highly probable. “It would give on my nerves, the life I lead her,” Miriam continued; “but she’s really a delicious woman.”
     The oddity of this epithet made Sherringham laugh, and altogether, in a few minutes, which is perhaps a sign that he abused his right to be a man of moods, the young lady had produced a revolution of curiosity in him, re-awakened his sympathy. Her mixture, as it spread itself before one, was a quickening spectacle: she was intelligent and clumsy – she was underbred and fine. Certainly she was very various, and that was rare; not at all at this moment the heavy-eyed, frightened creature who had pulled herself together with such an effort at Madame Carré’s, nor the elated ‘phenomenon’ who had just been declaiming, nor the rather affected and contradictious young person with whom he had walked home from the Rue de Constantinople. Was this succession of phases a sign that she really possessed the celebrated artistic temperament, the nature that made people provoking and interesting? That Sherringham himself was of that shifting complexion is perhaps proved by his odd capacity for being of two different minds at very nearly the same time. Miriam was pretty now, with likeable looks and charming usual eyes. Yes, there were things he could do for her; he had already forgotten the chill of Mr Nash’s irony, of his prophecy. He was even scarcely conscious how much, in general, he detested hints, insinuations, favours asked obliquely and plaintively: that was doubtless also because the girl was so pretty and so fraternizing. Perhaps indeed it was unjust to qualify it as roundabout, the manner in which Miss Rooth conveyed to him that it was open to him not only to pay for lessons for her, but to meet the expense of her nightly attendance, with her mother, at instructive exhibitions of theatrical art. It was a large order, sending the pair to all the plays; but what Sherringham now found himself thinking about was not so much its largeness as that it would be rather interesting to go with them sometimes and point the moral (the technical one), showing her the things he liked, the things he disapproved. She repeated her declaration that she recognized the fallacy of her mother’s views about ‘noble’ heroines and about the importance of her looking out for such tremendously proper people. “One must let her talk, but of course it creates a prejudice,” she said, with her eyes on Mr and Mrs Lovick, who had got up, terminating their communion with Mrs Rooth. “It’s a great muddle, I know, but she can’t bear anything coarse – and quite right, too. I shouldn’t, either, if I didn’t have to. But I don’t care where I go if I can act, or who they are if they’ll help me. I want to act – that’s what I want to do; I don’t want to meddle in people’s affairs. I can look out for myself – I’m all right!” the girl exclaimed, roundly, frankly, with a ring of honesty which made her crude and pure. “As for doing the bad ones, I’m not afraid of that.”
     “The bad ones?”
     “The bad women, in the plays – like Madame Carré. I’ll do anything.”
     “I think you’ll do best what you are,” remarked Sherringham, laughing. “You’re a strange girl.”
     “Je crois bien! Doesn’t one have to be, to want to go and exhibit one’s self to a loathsome crowd, on a platform, with trumpets and a big drum, for money – to parade one’s body and one’s soul?”
     Sherringham looked at her a moment: her face changed constantly; now there was a little flush and a noble delicacy in it.
     “Give it up; you’re too good for it,” he said, abruptly.
     “Never, never – never till I’m pelted!”
     “Then stay on here a bit; I’ll take you to the theatres.”
     “Oh, you dear!” Miriam delightedly exclaimed. Mr and Mrs Lovick, accompanied by Mrs Rooth, now crossed the room to them, and the girl went on, in the same tone: “Mamma, dear, he’s the best friend we’ve ever had; he’s a great deal nicer than I thought.”
     “So are you, mademoiselle,” said Peter Sherringham.
     “Oh, I trust Mr Sherringham – I trust him infinitely,” Mrs Rooth returned, covering him with her mild, respectable, wheedling eyes. “The kindness of every one has been beyond everything. Mr and Mrs Lovick can’t say enough. They make the most obliging offers; they want you to know their brother.”
     “Oh, I say, he’s no brother of mine,” Mr Lovick protested, good-naturedly.
     “They think he’ll be so suggestive, he’ll put us up to the right things,” Mrs Rooth went on.
     “It’s just a little brother of mine – such a dear, clever boy,” Mrs Lovick explained.
     “Do you know she has got nine? Upon my honour she has!” said her husband. “This one is the sixth. Fancy if I had to take them over!”
     “Yes, it makes it rather awkward,” Mrs Lovick amiably conceded. “He has gone on the stage, poor dear boy; he acts rather well.”
     “He tried for the diplomatic service, but he didn’t precisely dazzle his examiners,” Mr Lovick remarked.
     “Edmund’s very nasty about him. There are lots of gentlemen on the stage; he’s not the first.”
     “It’s such a comfort to hear that,” said Mrs Rooth.
     “I’m much obliged to you. Has he got a theatre?” Miriam asked.
     “My dear young lady, he hasn’t even got an engagement,” replied the young man’s unsympathizing brother-in-law.
     “He hasn’t been at it very long, but I’m sure he’ll get on. He’s immensely in earnest, and he’s very good-looking. I just said that if he should come over to see us you might rather like to meet him. He might give you some tips, as my husband says.”
     “I don’t care for his looks, but I should like his tips,” said Miriam, smiling.
     “And is he coming over to see you?” asked Sherringham, to whom, while this exchange of remarks, which he had not lost, was going on, Mrs Rooth had, in lowered accents, addressed herself.
     “Not if I can help it, I think!” Mr Lovick declared, but so jocosely that it was not embarrassing.
     “Oh, sir, I’m sure you’re fond of him,” Mrs Rooth remonstrated, as the party passed together into the ante-chamber.
     “No, really, I like some of the others – four or five of them; but I don’t like Arty.”
     “We’ll make it up to him, then; we’ll like him,” Miriam declared, gaily; and her voice rang in the staircase (Sherringham went a little way with them), with a charm which her host had not perceived in her sportive note the day before.

     For several days Peter Sherringham had business in hand which left him neither time nor freedom of mind to occupy himself actively with the ladies of the Hôtel de la Garonne. There were moments when they brushed across his memory, but their passage was rapid and not lighted up with any particular complacency of attention; for he shrank considerably from bringing it to the proof – the question of whether Miriam would be an interest or only a bore. She had left him, after their second meeting, with a quickened expectation, but in the course of a few hours that flame had burned dim. Like many other men Sherringham was a mixture of impulse and reflection; but he was peculiar in this, that thinking things over almost always made him think less well of them. He found illusions necessary, so that in order to keep an adequate number going he often earnestly forbade himself that exercise. Mrs Rooth and her daughter were there and could certainly be trusted to make themselves felt. He was conscious of their anxiety, their calculations, as of a kind of oppression; he knew that, whatever results might ensue, he should have to do something positive for them. An idea of tenacity, of worrying feminine duration, associated itself with their presence; he would have assented with a silent nod to the proposition (enunciated by Gabriel Nash) that he was saddled with them. Remedies hovered before him, but they figured also at the same time as complications; ranging vaguely from the expenditure of money to the discovery that he was in love. This latter accident would be particularly tedious; he had a full perception of the arts by which the girl’s mother might succeed in making it so. It would not be a compensation for trouble, but a trouble which in itself would require compensation. Would that balm spring from the spectacle of the young lady’s genius? The genius would have to be very great to justify a rising young diplomatist in making a fool of himself.
     With the excuse of pressing work he put off his young pupil from day to day, and from day to day he expected to hear her knock at his door. It would be time enough when they came after him; and he was unable to see how, after all, he could serve them even then. He had proposed impetuously a course of theatres; but that would be a considerable personal effort, now that the summer was about to begin, with bad air, stale pieces, tired actors. When, however, more than a week had elapsed without a reminder of his neglected promise, it came over him that he must himself in honour give a sign. There was a delicacy in such discretion – he was touched by being let alone. The flurry of work at the Embassy was over, and he had time to ask himself what, in especial, he should do. He wished to have something definite to suggest before communicating with the Hôtel de la Garonne.
     As a consequence of this speculation he went back to Madame Carré, to ask her to reconsider her unfavourable judgement and give the young English lady – to oblige him – a dozen lessons of the sort that she knew how to give. He was aware that this request scarcely stood on its feet; for in the first place Madame Carré never reconsidered, when once she had got her impression, and in the second she never wasted herself on subjects whom nature had not formed to do her honour. He knew that his asking her to strain a point to please him would give her a false idea (for that matter, she had it already) of his relations, actual or prospective, with the girl; but he reflected that he needn’t care for that, as Miriam herself probably wouldn’t care. What he had mainly in mind was to say to the old actress that she had been mistaken – the jeune Anglaise was not such a duffer. This would take some courage, but it would also add to the amusement of his visit.
     He found her at home, but as soon as he had expressed the conviction I have mentioned she exclaimed: “Oh, your jeune Anglaise, I know a great deal more about her than you! She has been back to see me twice; she doesn’t go the longest way round. She charges me like a grenadier, and she asks me to give her – guess a little what! – private recitations, all to herself. If she doesn’t succeed it won’t be for want of knowing how to thump at doors. The other day, when I came in, she was waiting for me; she had been there for an hour. My private recitations – have you an idea what people pay for them?”
     “Between artists, you know, there are easier conditions,” Sherringham laughed.
     “How do I know if she’s an artist? She won’t open her mouth to me; what she wants is to make me say things to her. She does make me – I don’t know how – and she sits there gaping at me with her big eyes. They look like open pockets!”
     “I dare say she’ll profit by it,” said Sherringham.
     “I dare say you will! Her face is stupid while she watches me, and when she has tired me out she simply walks away. However, as she comes back—” Madame Carré paused a moment, listened, and then exclaimed: “Didn’t I tell you?”
     Sherringham heard a parley of voices in the little antechamber, and the next moment the door was pushed open and Miriam Rooth bounded into the room. She was flushed and breathless, without a smile, very direct.
     “Will you hear me to-day? I know four things,” she immediately began. Then, perceiving Sherringham, she added in the same brisk, earnest tone, as if the matter were of the highest importance: “Oh, how d’ye do? I’m very glad you are here.” She said nothing else to him than this, appealed to him in no way, made no allusion to his having neglected her, but addressed herself entirely to Madame Carré, as if he had not been there; making no excuses and using no flattery; taking rather a tone of equal authority, as if she considered that the celebrated artist had a sacred duty toward her. This was another variation, Sherringham thought; it differed from each of the attitudes in which he had previously seen her. It came over him suddenly that so far from there being any question of her having the histrionic nature, she simply had it in such perfection that she was always acting; that her existence was a series of parts assumed for the moment, each changed for the next, before the perpetual mirror of some curiosity or admiration or wonder – some spectatorship that she perceived or imagined in the people about her. Interested as he had ever been in the profession of which she was potentially an ornament, this idea startled him by its novelty and even lent, on the spot, a formidable, a really appalling character to Miriam Rooth. It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to ‘make believe’, to make believe that she had any and every being that you liked, that would serve a purpose, produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration – such a woman was a kind of monster, in whom of necessity there would be nothing to like, because there would be nothing to take hold of. He felt for a moment that he had been very simple not before to have achieved that analysis of the actress. The girl’s very face made it vivid to him now – the discovery that she positively had no countenance of her own, but only the countenance of the occasion, a sequence, a variety (capable possibly of becoming immense), of representative movements. She was always trying them, practising them for her amusement or profit, jumping from one to the other and extending her range; and this would doubtless be her occupation more and more as she acquired case and confidence. The expression that came nearest to belonging to her, as it were, was the one that came nearest to being a blank – an air of inanity when she forgot herself, watching something. Then her eye was heavy and her mouth rather common; though it was perhaps just at such a moment that the fine line of her head told most. She had looked slightly bête even when Sherringham, on their first meeting at Madame Carré’s said to Nick Dormer that she was the image of the Tragic Muse.
     Now, at any rate, he had the apprehension that she might do what she liked with her face. It was an elastic substance, an element of gutta-percha, like the flexibility of the gymnast, the lady who, at a music-hall, is shot from the mouth of a cannon. He coloured a little at this quickened view of the actress; he had always looked more poetically, somehow, at that priestess of art. But what was she, the priestess, when one came to think of it, but a female gymnast, a mountebank at higher wages? She didn’t literally hang by her heels from a trapeze, holding a fat man in her teeth, but she made the same use of her tongue, of her eyes, of the imitative trick, that her muscular sister made of leg and jaw. It was an odd circumstance that Miriam Rooth’s face seemed to him to-day a finer instrument than old Madame Carré’s. It was doubtless that the girl’s face was fresh and strong, with a future in it, while poor Madame Carré’s was worn and weary, with only a past.
     The old woman said something, half in jest, half in real resentment, about the brutality of youth, as Miriam went to a mirror and quickly took off her hat, patting and arranging her hair as a preliminary to making herself heard. Sherringham saw with surprise and amusement that the clever Frenchwoman, who had in her long life exhausted every adroitness, was in a manner helpless, condemned, both protesting and consenting. Miriam had taken but a few days and a couple of visits to become a successful force; she had imposed herself, and Madame Carré, while she laughed (yet looked terrible too, with artifices of eye and gesture), was reduced to the last line of defence – that of declaring her coarse and clumsy, saying she might knock her down, but that proved nothing. She spoke jestingly enough not to offend Miriam, but her manner betrayed the irritation of an intelligent woman who, at an advanced age, found herself for the first time failing to understand. What she didn’t understand was the kind of social product that had been presented to her by Gabriel Nash; and this suggested to Sherringham that the jeune Anglaise was perhaps indeed rare, a new type, as Madame Carré must have seen innumerable varieties. He guessed that the girl was perfectly prepared to be abused and that her indifference to what might be thought of her discretion was a proof of life, health and spirit, the insolence of conscious power.
     When she had given herself a touch at the glass she turned round, with a rapid “Ecoutez maintenant!” and stood leaning a moment, slightly lowered and inclined backward, with her hands behind her and supporting her, on the table in front of the mirror. She waited an instant, turning her eyes from one of her companions to the other as if she were taking possession of them (an eminently conscious, intentional proceeding, which made Sherringham ask himself what had become of her former terror and whether that and her tears had all been a comedy): after which, abruptly straightening herself, she began to repeat a short French poem, a composition modern and delicate, one of the things she had induced Madame Carré to say over to her. She had learned it, practised it, rehearsed it to her mother, and now she had been childishly eager to show what she could do with it. What she mainly did was to reproduce with a crude fidelity, but with extraordinary memory, the intonations, the personal quavers and cadences of her model.
     “How bad you make me seem to myself, and if I were you how much better I should say it!” was Madame Carré’s first criticism.
     Miriam allowed her little time to develop this idea, for she broke out, at the shortest intervals, with the five other specimens of verse to which the old actress had handed her the key. They were all delicate lyrics, of tender or pathetic intention, by contemporary poets – all things demanding perfect taste and art, a mastery of tone, of insinuation, in the interpreter. Miriam, had gobbled them up, she gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude, audacious mimicry. There was a moment when Sherringham was afraid Madame Carré would think she was making fun of her manner, her celebrated simpers and grimaces, so extravagant did the girl’s performance cause these refinements to appear.
     When she had finished, the old woman said: “Should you like now to hear how you do it?” and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled the last of the pieces, from beginning to end, exactly as Miriam had done, making this imitation of an imitation the drollest thing conceivable. If she had been annoyed it was a perfect revenge. Miriam had dropped on a sofa, exhausted, and she stared at first, looking flushed and wild; then she gave way to merriment, laughing with a high sense of comedy. She said afterwards, to defend herself, that the verses in question, and indeed all those she had recited, were of the most difficult sort: you had to do them; they didn’t do themselves – they were things in which the gros moyens were of no avail. “Ah, my poor child, your means are all gros moyens; you appear to have no others,” Madame Carré replied. “You do what you can, but there are people like that; it’s the way they are made. They can never come nearer to the delicate; shades don’t exist for them, they don’t see certain differences. It was to show you a difference that I repeated that thing as you repeat it, as you represent my doing it. If you are struck with the little the two ways have in common, so much the better. But you seem to me to coarsen everything you touch.”
     Sherringham thought this judgement harsh to cruelty, and perceived that Miss Rooth had the power to set the teeth of her instructress on edge. She acted on her nerves; she was made of a thick, rough substance which the old woman was not accustomed to manipulate. This exasperation, however, was a kind of flattery; it was neither indifference nor simple contempt; it acknowledged a mystifying reality in the girl and even a degree of importance. Miriam remarked, serenely enough, that the things she wanted most to do were just those that were not for the gros moyens, the vulgar obvious dodges, the starts and shouts that any one could think of and that the gros public liked. She wanted to do what was most difficult and to plunge into it from the first; and she explained, as if it were a discovery of her own, that there were two kinds of scenes and speeches: those which acted themselves, of which the treatment was plain, the only way, so that you had just to take it; and those which were open to interpretation, with which you had to fight every step, rendering, arranging, doing it according to your idea. Some of the most effective things, and the most celebrated and admired, like the frenzy of Juliet with her potion, were of the former sort; but it was the others she liked best.
     Madame Carré received this revelation good-naturedly enough, considering its want of freshness, and only laughed at the young lady for looking so nobly patronizing while she gave it. It was clear that her laughter was partly dedicated to the good faith with which Miriam described herself as preponderantly interested in the subtler problems of her art. Sherringham was charmed with the girl’s pluck – if it was pluck and not mere density – the brightness with which she submitted, for a purpose, to the old woman’s rough usage. He wanted to take her away, to give her a friendly caution, to advise her not to become a bore, not to expose herself. But she held up her beautiful head in a way that showed she didn’t care at present how she exposed herself, and that (it was half coarseness – Madame Carré was so far right – and half fortitude) she had no intention of coming away so long as there was anything to be picked up. She sat, and still she sat, challenging her hostess with every sort of question – some reasonable, some ingenious, some strangely futile and some highly indiscreet; but all with the effect that, contrary to Sherringham’s expectation, Madame Carré warmed to the work of answering and explaining, became interested, was content to keep her and to talk. Yet she took her ease; she relieved herself, with the rare cynicism of the artist, all the crudity, the irony and intensity of a discussion of esoteric things, of personal mysteries, of methods and secrets. It was the oddest hour Sherringham had ever spent, even in the course of investigation which had often led him into the cuisine, as the French called it, the distillery or back-shop of the admired profession. He got up several times to come away; then he remained, partly in order not to leave Miriam alone with her terrible initiatress, partly because he was both amused and edified, and partly because Madame Carré held him by the appeal of her sharp, confidential old eyes, addressing her talk to him, with Miriam as a subject, a vile illustration. She undressed this young lady, as it were, from head to foot, turned her inside out, weighed and measured and sounded her: it was all, for Sherringham, a new revelation of the point to which, in her profession and nation, a ferocious analysis had been carried, with an intelligence of the business and a special vocabulary. What struck him above all was the way she knew her reasons and everything was sharp and clear in her mind and lay under her hand. If she had rare perceptions she had traced them to their source; she could give an account of what she did; she knew perfectly why; she could explain it, defend it, amplify it, fight for it: and all this was an intellectual joy to her, allowing her a chance to abound and insist and be clever. There was a kind of cruelty, or at least of hardness in it all, to Sherringham’s English sense, that sense which can never really reconcile itself to the question of execution and has extraneous sentiments to placate with compromises and superficialities, frivolities that have often a pleasant moral fragrance. In theory there was nothing that he valued more than just such a logical passion as Madame Carré’s; but in fact, when he found himself in close quarters with it, it was apt to seem to him an ado about nothing.
     If the old woman was hard, it was not that many of her present conclusions, as regards Miriam, were not indulgent, but that she had a vision of the great manner, of right and wrong, of the just and the false, so high and religious that the individual was nothing before it – a prompt and easy sacrifice. It made Sherringham uncomfortable, as he had been made uncomfortable by certain feuilletons, reviews of the theatres in the Paris newspapers, which he was committed to thinking important, but of which, when they were very good, he was rather ashamed. When they were very good, that is when they were very thorough, they were very personal, as was inevitable in dealing with the most personal of the arts: they went into details; they put the dots on the i’s; they discussed impartially the qualities of appearance, the physical gifts of the actor or actress, finding them in some cases reprehensibly inadequate. Sherringham could not rid himself of a prejudice against these pronouncements; in the case of the actresses especially they appeared to him brutal and indelicate – unmanly as coming from a critic sitting smoking in his chair. At the same time he was aware of the dilemma (he hated it; it made him blush still more) in which his objection lodged him. If one was right in liking the actor’s art one ought to have been interested in every candid criticism of it, which, given the peculiar conditions, would be legitimate in proportion as it should he minute. If the criticism that recognized frankly these conditions seemed an inferior or an offensive thing, then what was to be said for the art itself? What an implication, if the criticism was tolerable only so long as it was worthless – so long as it remained vague and timid! This was a knot which Sherringham had never straightened out: he contented himself with saying that there was no reason a theatrical critic shouldn’t be a gentleman, at the same time that he often remarked that it was an odious trade, which no gentleman could possibly follow. The best of the fraternity, so conspicuous in Paris, were those who didn’t follow it – those who, while pretending to write about the stage, wrote about everything else.
     It was as if Madame Carré, in pursuance of her inflamed sense that the art was everything and the individual nothing, save as he happened to serve it, had said: “Well, if she will have it she shall; she shall know what she is in for, what I went through, battered and broken in as we all have been – all who are worthy, who have had the honour. She shall know the real point of view.” It was as if she were still haunted with Mrs Rooth’s nonsense, her hypocrisy, her scruples – something she felt a need to belabour, to trample on. Miriam took it all as a bath, a baptism, with passive exhilaration and gleeful shivers; staring, wondering, sometimes blushing and failing to follow, but not shrinking nor wounded; laughing, when it was necessary, at her own expense, and feeling evidently that this at last was the air of the profession, an initiation which nothing could undo. Sherringham said to her that he would see her home – that he wanted to talk to her and she must walk away with him. “And it’s understood, then, she may come back,” he added to Madame Carré. “It’s my affair, of course. You’ll take an interest in her for a month or two; she will sit at your feet.”
     “Oh, I’ll knock her about; she seems stout enough!” said the old actress.

     When she had descended into the street with Sherringham Miriam informed him that she was thirsty, dying to drink something: upon which he asked her if she would have any objection to going with him to a café.
     “Objection? I have spent my life in cafés!” she exclaimed. “They are warm in winter and are full of gaslight. Mamma and I have sat in them for hours, many a time, with a consommation of three sous, to save fire and candles at home. We have lived in places we couldn’t sit in, if you want to know – where there was only really room if we were in bed. Mamma’s money is sent out from England, and sometimes it didn’t come. Once it didn’t come for months – for months and months. I don’t know how we lived. There wasn’t any to come; there wasn’t any to get home. That isn’t amusing when you’re away, in a foreign town, without any friends. Mamma used to borrow, but people wouldn’t always lend. You needn’t be afraid – she won’t borrow from you. We are rather better now. Something has been done in England; I don’t understand what. It’s only fivepence a year, but it has been settled; it comes regularly; it used to come only when we had written and begged and waited. But it made no difference; mamma was always up to her ears in books. They served her for food and drink. When she had nothing to eat she began a novel in ten volumes – the old-fashioned ones; they lasted longest. She knows every cabinet de lecture in every town; the little cheap, shabby ones, I mean, in the back streets, where they have odd volumes and only ask a sou, and the books are so old that they smell bad. She takes them to the cafés – the little cheap, shabby cafés, too – and she reads there all the evening. That’s very well for her, but it doesn’t feed me. I don’t like a diet of dirty old novels. I sit there beside her, with nothing to do, not even a stocking to mend; she doesn’t think that’s comme il faut. I don’t know what the people take me for. However, we have never been spoken to: any one can see mamma’s a lady. As for me, I dare say I might be anything. If you’re going to be an actress you must get used to being looked at. There were people in England who used to ask us to stay; some of them were our cousins – or mamma says they were. I have never been very clear about our cousins, and I don’t think they were at all clear about us. Some of them are dead; the others don’t ask us any more. You should hear mamma on the subject of our visits in England. It’s very convenient when your cousins are dead, because that explains everything. Mamma has delightful phrases: ‘My family is almost extinct.’ Then your family may have been anything you like. Ours, of course, was magnificent. We did stay in a place once where there was a deer-park, and also private theatricals. I played in them; I was only fifteen years old, but I was very big and I thought I was in heaven. I will go anywhere you like; you needn’t be afraid; we have been in places! I have learned a great deal that way; sitting beside mamma and watching people, their faces, their types, their movements. There’s a great deal goes on in cafés: people come to them to talk things over, their private affairs, their complications; they have important meetings. Oh, I’ve observed scenes, between men and women – very quiet, terribly quiet, but tragic! Once I saw a woman do something that I’m going to do some day, when I’m great – if I can get the situation. I’ll tell you what it is some day; I’ll do it for you. Oh, it is the book of life!”
     So Miriam discoursed, familiarly, disconnectedly, as the pair went their way down the Rue de Constantinople; and she continued to abound in anecdote and remark after they were seated face to face at a little marble table in an establishment which Sherringham selected carefully and he had caused her, at her request, to be accommodated with sirop d’orgeat. “I know what it will come to: Madame Carré will want to keep me.” This was one of the announcements she presently made.
     “To keep you?”
     “For the French stage. She won’t want to let you have me.” She said things of that kind, astounding in self-complacency, the assumption of quick success. She was in earnest, evidently prepared to work, but her imagination flew over preliminaries and probations, took no account of the steps in the process, especially the first tiresome ones, the test of patience. Sherringham had done nothing for her as yet, given no substantial pledge of interest; yet she was already talking as if his protection were assured and jealous. Certainly, however, she seemed to belong to him very much indeed, as she sat facing him in the Paris café, in her youth, her beauty and her talkative confidence. This degree of possession was highly agreeable to him, and he asked nothing more than to make it last and go further. The impulse to draw her out was irresistible, to encourage her to show herself to the end; for if he was really destined to take her career in hand he counted on some pleasant equivalent – such, for instance, as that she should at least amuse him.
     “It’s very singular; I know nothing like it,” he said – “your equal mastery of two languages.”
     “Say of half a dozen,” Miriam smiled.
     “Oh, I don’t believe in the others to the same degree. I don’t imagine that, with all deference to your undeniable facility, you would be judged fit to address a German or an Italian audience in their own tongue. But you might a French, perfectly, and they are the most particular of all; for their idiom is supersensitive and they are incapable of enduring the baragouinage of foreigners, to which we listen with such complacency. In fact, your French is better than your English – it’s more conventional; there are little queernesses and impurities in your English, as if you had lived abroad too much. Ah, you must work that.”
     “I’ll work it with you. I like the way you speak.”
     “You must speak beautifully; you must do something for the standard.”
     “For the standard?”
     “There isn’t any, after all; it has gone to the dogs.”
     “Oh, I’ll bring it back. I know what you mean.”
     “No one knows, no one cares; the sense is gone – it isn’t in the public,” Sherringham continued, ventilating a grievance he was rarely able to forget, the vision of which now suddenly made a mission full of sanctity for Miriam Rooth. “Purity of speech, on our stage, doesn’t exist. Every one speaks as he likes, and audiences never notice; it’s the last thing they think of. The place is given up to abominable dialects and individual tricks, any vulgarity flourishes, and on the top of it all the Americans, with every conceivable crudity, come in to make confusion worse confounded. And when one laments it people stare; they don’t know what one means.”
     “Do you mean the grand manner, certain pompous pronunciations, the style of the Kembles?”
     “I mean any style that is a style, that is a system, an art, that contributes a positive beauty to utterance. When I pay ten shillings to hear you speak, I want you to know how, que diable! Say that to people and they are mostly lost in stupor; only a few, the very intelligent ones, exclaim: “Then do you want actors to be affected?”
     “And do you?” asked Miriam, full of interest.
     “My poor child, what else, under the sun, should they be? Isn’t their whole art the affectation par excellence? The public won’t stand that to-day, so one hears it said. If that be true, it simply means that the theatre, as I care for it, that is as a personal art, is at an end.”
     “Never, never, never!” the girl cried, in a voice that made a dozen people look round.
     “I sometimes think it – that the personal art is at an end, and that henceforth we shall have only the arts – capable, no doubt, of immense development in their way (indeed they have already reached it) – of the stage-carpenter and the costumer. In London the drama is already smothered in scenery; the interpretation scrambles off as it can. To get the old personal impression, which used to be everything, you must go to the poor countries, and most of all to Italy.”
     “Oh, I’ve had it; it’s very personal!” said Miriam, knowingly.
     “You’ve seen the nudity of the stage, the poor painted, tattered screen behind, and in the empty space the histrionic figure, doing everything it knows how, in complete possession. The personality isn’t our English personality, and it may not always carry us with it; but the direction is right, and it has the superiority that it’s a human exhibition, not a mechanical one.”
     “I can act just like an Italian,” said Miriam, eagerly.
     “I would rather you acted like an Englishwoman, if an Englishwoman would only act.”
     “Oh, I’ll show you!”
     “But you’re not English,” said Sherringham, sociably, with his arms on the table.
     “I beg your pardon; you should hear mamma about our ‘race’.”
     “You’re a Jewess – I’m sure of that,” Sherringham went on.
     She jumped at this, as he was destined to see, later, that she would jump at anything that would make her more interesting or striking; even at things which, grotesquely, contradicted or excluded each other. “That’s always possible, if one’s clever. I’m very willing, because I want to be the English Rachel.”
     “Then you must leave Madame Carré, as soon as you have got from her what she can give.”
     “Oh, you needn’t fear; you sha’n’t lose me,” the girl replied, with gross, charming fatuity. “My name is Jewish,” she went on, “but it was that of my grandmother, my father’s mother. She was a baroness, in Germany. That is she was the daughter of a baron.”
     Sherringham accepted this statement with reservations, but he replied: “Put all that together, and it makes you very sufficiently of Rachel’s tribe.”
     “I don’t care, if I’m of her tribe artistically. I’m of the family of the artists; je me fiche of any other! I’m in the same style as that woman; I know it.”
     “You speak as if you had seen her,” said Sherringham, amused at the way she talked of ‘that woman’.
     “Oh, I know all about her; I know all about all the great actors. But that won’t prevent me from speaking divine English.”
     “You must learn lots of verse; you must repeat it to me,” Sherringham went on. “You must break yourself in till you can say anything. You must learn passages of Milton, passages of Wordsworth.”
     “Did they write plays?”
     “Oh, it isn’t only a matter of plays! You can’t speak a part properly till you can speak everything else, anything that comes up, especially in proportion as it’s difficult. That gives you authority.”
     “Oh, yes, I’m going in for authority. There’s more chance in English,” the girl added, in the next breath. “There are not so many others – the terrible competition. There are so many here – not that I’m afraid,” she chattered on. “But we’ve got America, and they haven’t. America’s a great place.”
     “You talk like a theatrical agent. They’re lucky not to have it as we have it. Some of them do go, and it ruins them.”
     “Why, it fills their pockets!” Miriam cried.
     “Yes, but see what they pay. It’s the death of an actor to play to big populations that don’t understand his language. It’s nothing then but the gros moyens; all his delicacy perishes. However, they’ll understand you.”
     “Perhaps I shall be too affected,” said Miriam.
     “You won’t be more so than Garrick or Mrs Siddons or John Kemble or Edmund Kean. They understood Edmund Kean. All reflection is affectation, and all acting is reflection.”
     “I don’t know; mine is instinct,” Miriam replied.
     “My dear young lady, you talk of ‘yours’; but don’t be offended if I tell you that yours doesn’t exist. Some day it will, if it comes off. Madame Carré’s does, because she has reflected. The talent, the desire, the energy are an instinct; but by the time these things become a performance they are an instinct put in its place.”
     “Madame Carré is very philosophic. I shall never be like her.”
     “Of course you won’t; you’ll be original. But you’ll have your own ideas.”
     “I dare say I shall have a good many of yours,” said Miriam, smiling across the table.
     They sat a moment looking at each other.
     “Don’t go in for coquetry; it’s a waste of time.”
     “Well, that’s civil!” the girl cried.
     “Oh, I don’t mean for me; I mean for yourself. I want you to be so concentrated. I am bound to give you good advice. You don’t strike me as flirtatious and that sort of thing, and that’s in your favour.”
     “In my favour!”
     “It does save time.”
     “Perhaps it saves too much. Don’t you think the artist ought to have passions?”
     Sherringham hesitated a moment: he thought an examination of this question premature. “Flirtations are not passions,” he replied. “No, you are simple – at least I suspect you are; for of course, with a woman, one would be clever to know.” She asked why he pronounced her simple, but he judged it best, and more consonant with fair play, to defer even a treatment of this branch of the question; so that, to change the subject, he said: “Be sure you don’t betray me to your friend Mr Nash.”
     “Betray you? Do you mean about your recommending affectation?”
     “Dear me, no; he recommends it himself. That is he practises it, and on a scale!”
     “But he makes one hate it.”
     “He proves what I mean,” said Sherringham: “that the great comedian is the one who raises it to a science. If we paid ten shillings to listen to Mr Nash, we should think him very fine. But we want to know what it’s supposed to be.”
     “It’s too odious, the way he talks about us!” Miriam cried, assentingly.
     “About ‘us’?”
     “Us poor actors.”
     “It’s the competition he dislikes,” said Sherringham, laughing.
     “However, he is very good-natured; he lent mamma thirty pounds,” the girl added, honestly. Sherringham, at this information, was not able to repress a certain small twinge which his companion perceived and of which she appeared to mistake the meaning. “Of course he’ll get it back,” she went on, while Sherringham looked at her in silence for a minute. Fortune had not supplied him profusely with money, but his emotion was not caused by the apprehension that he too would probably have to put his hand in his pocket for Mrs Rooth. It was simply the instinctive recoil of a fastidious nature from the idea of familiar intimacy with people who lived from hand to mouth, and a sense that that intimacy would have to be defined if it was to go much further. He would wish to know what it was supposed to be, like Gabriel Nash’s histrionics. After a moment Miriam mistook his thought still more completely, and in doing so gave him a flash of foreknowledge of the way it was in her to strike from time to time a note exasperatingly, almost consciously vulgar, which one would hate for the reason, among others, that by that time one would be in love with her. “Well, then, he won’t – if you don’t believe it!” she exclaimed, with a laugh. He was saying to himself that the only possible form was that they should borrow only from him. “You’re a funny man: I make you blush,” Miriam persisted.
     “I must reply with the tu quoque, though I have not that effect on you.”
     “I don’t understand,” said the girl.
     “You’re an extraordinary young lady.”
     “You mean I’m horrid. Well, I dare say I am. But I’m better when you know me.”
     Sherringham made no direct rejoinder to this, but after a moment he said: “Your mother must repay that money. I’ll give it to her.”
     “You had better give it to him!” cried Miriam. “If once we have it—” She interrupted herself, and with another and a softer tone, one of her professional transitions, she remarked: “I suppose you have never known any one that’s poor.”
     “I’m poor myself. That is I’m very far from rich. But why receive favours—?” And here he, in turn, checked himself, with the sense that he was indeed taking a great deal on his back if he pretended already (he had not seen the pair three times) to regulate their intercourse with the rest of the world. But Miriam instantly carried out his thought and more than his thought.
     “Favours from Mr Nash? Oh, he doesn’t count!”
     The way she dropped these words (they would have been admirable on the stage) made him laugh and say immediately: “What I meant just now was that you are not to tell him, after all my swagger, that I consider that you and I are really required to save our theatre.”
     “Oh, if we can save it, he shall know it!” Then Miriam added that she must positively get home; her mother would be in a state: she had really scarcely ever been out alone. He mightn’t think it, but so it was. Her mother’s ideas, those awfully proper ones, were not all talk. She did keep her! Sherringham accepted this – he had an adequate, and indeed an analytic vision of Mrs Rooth’s conservatism; but he observed at the same time that his companion made no motion to rise. He made none, either; he only said –
     “We are very frivolous, the way we chatter. What you want to do, to get your foot in the stirrup, is supremely difficult. There is everything to overcome. You have neither an engagement nor the prospect of an engagement.”
     “Oh, you’ll get me one!” Miriam’s manner expressed that this was so certain that it was not worth dilating upon; so instead of dilating she inquired abruptly, a second time: “Why do you think I’m so simple?”
     “I don’t then. Didn’t I tell you just now that you were extraordinary? That’s the term moreover that you applied to yourself when you came to see me – when you said a girl had to be, to wish to go on the stage. It remains the right one, and your simplicity doesn’t mitigate it. What’s rare in you is that you have – as I suspect, at least – no nature of your own.” Miriam listened to this as if she were preparing to argue with it or not, only as it should strike her as being a pleasing picture; but as yet, naturally, she failed to understand. “You are always playing something; there are no intervals. It’s the absence of intervals, of a fond or background, that I don’t comprehend. You’re an embroidery without a canvas.”
     “Yes, perhaps,” the girl replied, with her head on one side, as if she were looking at the pattern. “But I’m very honest.”
     “You can’t be everything, a consummate actress and a flower of the field. You’ve got to choose.”
     She looked at him a moment. “I’m glad you think I’m so wonderful.”
     “Your feigning may be honest, in the sense that your only feeling is your feigned one,” Sherringham went on. “That’s what I mean by the absence of a ground or of intervals. It’s a kind of thing that’s a labyrinth!”
     “I know what I am,” said Miriam, sententiously.
     But her companion continued, following his own train: “Were you really so frightened, the first day you went to Madame Carré’s?”
     She stared a moment, and then with a flush, throwing back her head: “Do you think I was pretending?”
     “I think you always are. However, your vanity (if you had any!) would be natural.”
     “I have plenty of that – I am not ashamed to own it.”
     “You would be capable of pretending that you have. But excuse the audacity and the crudity of my speculations – it only proves my interest. What is it that you know you are?”
     “Why, an artist. Isn’t that a canvas?”
     “Yes, an intellectual one, but not a moral.”
     “Oh yes, it is, too. And I’m a good girl: won’t that do?”
     “It remains to be seen,” Sherringham laughed. “A creature who is all an artist – I am curious to see that.”
     “Surely it has been seen, in lots of painters, lots of musicians.”
     “Yes, but those arts are not personal, like yours. I mean not so much so. There’s something left for – what shall I call it? – for character.”
     Miriam stared again, with her tragic light. “And do you think I’ve got no character?” As he hesitated she pushed back her chair, rising rapidly.
     He looked up at her an instant – she seemed so ‘plastic’; and then, rising too, he answered: “Delightful being, you’ve got a hundred!”

     The summer arrived and the dense air of the Paris theatres became in fact a still more complicated mixture; yet the occasions were not few on which Peter Sherringham, having placed a box, near the stage (most often a stuffy, dusky baignoire), at the disposal of Mrs Rooth and her daughter, found time to look in, as he said, to spend a part of the evening with them and point the moral of the performance. The pieces, the successes of the winter, had entered the automatic phase: they went on by the force of the impetus acquired, deriving little fresh life from the interpretation, and in ordinary conditions their strong points, as rendered by the actors, would have been as wearisome to Sherringham as an importunate repetition of a good story. But it was not long before he became aware that the conditions could not be regarded as ordinary. There was a new infusion in his consciousness – an element in his life which altered the relations of things. He was not easy till he had found the right name for it – a name the more satisfactory that it was simple, comprehensive and plausible. A new ‘distraction’, in the French sense, was what he flattered himself he had discovered; he could recognize that as freely as possible without being obliged to classify the agreeable resource as a new entanglement. He was neither too much nor too little diverted; he had all his usual attention to give to his work: he had only an employment for his odd hours, which, without being imperative, had over various others the advantage of a certain continuity.
     And yet, I hasten to add, he was not so well pleased with it but that, among his friends, he maintained for the present a considerable reserve in regard to it. He had no irresistible impulse to tell people that he had disinterred a strange, handsome girl whom he was bringing up for the theatre. She had been seen by several of his associates at his rooms, but she was not soon to be seen there again. Sherringham’s reserve might by the ill-natured have been termed dissimulation, inasmuch as when asked by the ladies of the Embassy what had become of the young person who amused them that day so cleverly, he gave it out that her whereabouts was uncertain and her destiny probably obscure; he let it be supposed in a word that his benevolence had scarcely survived an accidental, charitable occasion. As he went about his customary business, and perhaps even put a little more conscience into the transaction of it, there was nothing to suggest to his companions that he was engaged in a private speculation of a singular kind. It was perhaps his weakness that he carried the apprehension of ridicule too far; but his excuse may be said to be that he held it unpardonable for a man publicly enrolled in the service of his country to be ridiculous. It was of course not out of all order that such functionaries, their private situation permitting, should enjoy a personal acquaintance with stars of the dramatic, the lyric or even the choreographic stage: high diplomatists had indeed not rarely and not invisibly cultivated this privilege without its proving the sepulchre of their reputation. That a gentleman who was not a fool should consent a little to become one for the sake of a celebrated actress or singer – cela s’était vu, though it was not perhaps to be recommended. It was not a tendency that was fostered at headquarters, where even the most rising young men were not encouraged to believe they could never fall. Still, it might pass if it were kept in its place; and there were ancient worthies yet in the profession (not those, however, whom the tradition had helped to go furthest) who held that something of the sort was a graceful ornament of the diplomatic character. Sherringham was aware he was very ‘rising’; but Miriam Rooth was not yet a celebrated actress. She was only a youthful artist, in conscientious process of formation, encumbered with a mother still more conscientious than herself. She was a young English lady, very earnest about artistic, about remunerative problems. He had accepted the position of a formative influence, and that was precisely what might provoke derision. He was a ministering angel – his patience and good-nature really entitled him to the epithet, and his rewards would doubtless some day define themselves; but meanwhile other promotions were in contingent prospect, for the failure of which these would not, even in their abundance, be a compensation. He kept an unembarrassed eye upon Downing Street; and while it may frankly be said for him that he was neither a pedant nor a prig, he remembered that the last impression he ought to wish to produce there was that of volatility.
     He felt not particularly volatile, however, when he sat behind Miriam at the play and looked over her shoulder at the stage: her observation being so keen and her comments so unexpected in their vivacity that his curiosity was refreshed and his attention stretched beyond its wont. If the spectacle before the footlights had now lost much of its annual brilliancy, the fashion in which Miriam followed it came near being spectacle enough. Moreover, in most cases the attendance of the little party was at the Théâtre Français; and it has been sufficiently indicated that Sherringham, though the child of a sceptical age and the votary of a cynical science, was still candid enough to take the serious, the religious view of that establishment – the view of M. Sarcey and of the unregenerate provincial mind. “In the trade that I follow we see things too much in the hard light of reason, of calculation,” he once remarked to his young protégée; “but it’s good for the mind to keep up a superstition or two: it leaves a margin, like having a second horse to your brougham for night-work. The arts, the amusements, the æsthetic part of life are night-work, if I may say so without suggesting the nefarious. At any rate you want your second horse – your superstition that stays at home when the sun is high – to go your rounds with. The Théâtre Français is my second horse.”
     Miriam’s appetite for this pleasure showed him vividly enough how rarely, in the past, it had been within her reach; and she pleased him at first by liking everything, seeing almost no differences and taking her deep draught undiluted. She leaned on the edge of the box with bright voracity, tasting to the core yet relishing the surface; watching each movement of each actor, attending to the way each thing was said or done as if it were the most important thing, and emitting from time to time applausive or restrictive sounds. It was a very pretty exhibition of enthusiasm, if enthusiasm be ever critical. Sherringham had his wonder about it, as it was a part of the attraction exerted by this young lady that she caused him to have his wonder about everything she did. Was it in fact an exhibition, a line taken for effect, so that at the comedy her own comedy was the most successful of all? That question danced attendance on the liberal intercourse of these young people and fortunately, as yet, did little to embitter Sherringham’s share of it. His general sense that she was personating had its especial moments of suspense and perplexity and added variety and even occasionally a degree of excitement to their conversation. At the theatre, for the most part, she was really flushed with eagerness; and with the spectators who turned an admiring eye into the dim compartment of which she pervaded the front, she might have passed for a romantic, or at any rate an insatiable young woman from the country.
     Mrs Rooth took a more placid view, but attended immensely to the story, in respect to which she manifested a patient good faith which had its surprises and its comicalities for Sherringham. She found no play too tedious, no entr’acte too long, no baignoire too hot, no tissue of incidents too complicated, no situation too unnatural and no sentiments too sublime. She gave Sherringham the measure of her power to sit and sit – an accomplishment to which she owed, in the struggle for existence, such superiority as she might be said to have achieved. She could outsit everyone, everything else; looking as if she had acquired the practice in repeated years of small frugality combined with large leisure – periods when she had nothing but time to spend and had learned to calculate, in any situation, how long she could stay. ‘Staying’ was so often a saving – a saving of candles, of fire and even (for it sometimes implied a vision of light refreshment) of food. Sherringham perceived soon enough that she was complete in her way, and if he had been addicted to studying the human mixture in its different combinations he would have found in her an interesting compendium of some of the infatuations that survive a hard discipline. He made indeed without difficulty the reflection that her life might have taught her the reality of things, at the same time that he could scarcely help thinking it clever of her to have so persistently declined the lesson. She appeared to have put it by with a deprecating, ladylike smile – a plea of being too soft and bland for experience.
     She took the refined, sentimental, tender view of the universe, beginning with her own history and feelings. She believed in everything high and pure, disinterested and orthodox, and even at the Hôtel de la Garonne was unconscious of the shabby or the ugly side of the world. She never despaired: otherwise what would have been the use of being a Neville-Nugent? Only not to have been one – that would have been discouraging. She delighted in novels, poems, perversions, misrepresentations and evasions, and had a capacity for smooth, superfluous falsification which made Sherringham think her sometimes an amusing and sometimes a tedious inventor. But she was not dangerous even if you believed her; she was not even a warning if you didn’t. It was harsh to call her a hypocrite, because you never could have resolved her back into her character: there was no reverse to her blazonry. She built in the air and was not less amiable than she pretended: only that was a pretence too. She moved altogether in a world of genteel fable and fancy, and Sherringham had to live in it with her, for Miriam’s sake, in sociable, vulgar assent, in spite of his feeling that it was rather a low neighbourhood. He was at a loss how to take what she said – she talked sweetly and discursively of so many things – until he simply perceived that he could only take it always for untrue. When Miriam laughed at her he was rather disagreeably affected: “dear mamma’s fine stories” was a sufficiently cynical reference to the immemorial infirmity of a parent. But when the girl backed her up, as he phrased it to himself, he liked that even less.
     Mrs Rooth was very fond of a moral and had never lost her taste for edification. She delighted in a beautiful character and was gratified to find so many represented in the contemporary French drama. She never failed to direct Miriam’s attention to them and to remind her that there is nothing in life so precious as the ideal. Sherringham noted the difference between the mother and the daughter and thought it singularly marked – the way that one took everything for the sense, or behaved as if she did, caring above all for the subject and the romance, the triumph or defeat of virtue and the moral comfort of it all, and that the other was especially hungry for the manner and the art of it, the presentation and the vividness. Mrs Rooth abounded in impressive evocations, and yet he saw no link between her facile genius and that of which Miriam gave symptoms. The poor lady never could have been accused of successful deceit, whereas success in this line was exactly what her clever child went in for. She made even the true seem fictive, while Miriam’s effort was to make the fictive true. Sherringham thought it an odd, unpromising stock (that of the Neville-Nugents) for a dramatic talent to have sprung from, till he reflected that the evolution was after all natural: the figurative impulse in the mother had become conscious, and therefore higher, through finding an aim, which was beauty, in the daughter. Likely enough the Hebraic Mr Rooth, with his love of old pots and Christian altar-cloths, had supplied, in the girl’s composition, the æsthetic element, the sense of form. In their visits to the theatre there was nothing that Mrs Rooth more insisted upon than the unprofitableness of deceit, as shown by the most distinguished authors – the folly and degradation, the corrosive effect upon the spirit, of tortuous ways. Sherringham very soon gave up the futile task of piecing together her incongruous references to her early life and her family in England. He renounced even the doctrine that there was a residuum of truth in her claim of great relationships, for, existent or not, he cared equally little for her ramifications. The principle of this indifference was at bottom a certain desire to disconnect Miriam; for it was disagreeable not to be independent in dealing with her, and he could be fully so only if she were.
     The early weeks of that summer (they went on indeed into August) were destined to establish themselves in his memory as a season of pleasant things. The ambassador went away, and Sherringham had to wait for his own holiday, which he did, during the hot days, contentedly enough, in spacious halls, with a dim, bird-haunted garden. The official world, and most other worlds withdrew from Paris, and the Place de la Concorde, a larger, whiter desert than ever, became, by a reversal of custom, explorable with safety. The Champs Elysées were dusty and rural, with little creaking booths and exhibitions which made a noise like grasshoppers; the Arc de Triomphe threw its cool, sharp shadow for a mile; the Palais de l’Industrie glittered in the light of the long days; the cabmen, in their red waistcoats, dozed in their boxes; and Sherringham permitted himself a ‘pot’ hat and rarely met a friend. Thus was Miriam still more disconnected, and thus was it possible to deal with her still more independently. The theatres on the boulevard closed, for the most part, but the great temple of the Rue de Richelieu, with an æsthetic responsibility, continued imperturbably to dispense examples of style. Madame Carré was going to Vichy, but she had not yet taken flight, which was a great advantage for Miriam, who could now solicit her attention with the consciousness that she had no engagements en ville.
     “I make her listen to me – I make her tell me,” said the ardent girl, who was always climbing the slope of the Rue de Constantinople, on the shady side, where in the July mornings there was a smell of violets from the moist flower-stands of fat, white-capped bouquetières, in the angles of doorways. Miriam liked the Paris of the summer mornings, the clever freshness of all the little trades and the open-air life, the cries, the talk from door to door, which reminded her of the south, where, in the multiplicity of her habitations, she had lived; and most of all the great amusement, or nearly, of her walk, the enviable baskets of the laundress, piled up with frilled and fluted whiteness – the certain luxury, she felt as she passed, with quick prevision, of her own dawn of glory. The greatest amusement perhaps was to recognize the pretty sentiment of earliness, the particular congruity with the hour, in the studied, selected dress of the little tripping women who were taking the day, for important advantages, while it was tender. At any rate she always brought with her from her passage through the town good-humour enough (with the penny bunch of violets that she stuck in the front of her dress) for whatever awaited her at Madame Carré’s. She told Sherringham that her dear mistress was terribly severe, giving her the most difficult, the most exhausting exercises – showing a kind of rage for breaking her in.
     “So much the better,” Sherringham answered; but he asked no questions and was glad to let the preceptress and the pupil fight it out together. He wanted, for the moment, to know as little as possible about them: he had been overdosed with knowledge that second day he saw them together. He would send Madame Carré her money (she was really most obliging), and in the meantime he was conscious that Miriam could take care of herself. Sometimes he remarked to her that she needn’t always talk ‘shop’ to him: there were times when he was very tired of shop – of hers. Moreover he frankly admitted that he was tired of his own, so that the restriction was not brutal. When she replied, staring: “Why, I thought you considered it as such a beautiful, interesting art!” he had no rejoinder more philosophic than “Well, I do; but there are moments when I’m sick of it, all the same.” At other times he said to her: “Oh, yes, the results, the finished thing, the dish, perfectly seasoned and served: not the mess of preparation – at least not always – not the experiments that spoil the material.”
     “I thought you thought just these questions of study, of the artistic education, as you have called it to me, so fascinating,” the girl persisted. Sometimes she was very lucid.
     “Well, after all I’m not an actor myself,” Sherringham answered, laughing.
     “You might be one if you were serious” said Miriam. To this her friend replied that Mr Gabriel Nash ought to hear that; which made her exclaim, with a certain grimness, that she would settle him and his theories some day. Not to seem too inconsistent – for it was cruel to bewilder her when he had taken her up to enlighten – Sherringham repeated over that for a man like himself the interest of the whole thing depended on its being considered in a large, liberal way, with an intelligence that lifted it out of the question of the little tricks of the trade, gave it beauty and elevation. Miriam let him know that Madame Carré held that there were no little tricks; that everything had its importance as a means to a great end; and that if you were not willing to try to approfondir the reason why in a given situation you should scratch your nose with your left hand rather than with your right, you were not worthy to tread any stage that respected itself.
     “That’s very well; but if I must go into details read me a little Shelley,” said the young man, in the spirit of a high raffiné.
     “You are worse than Madame Carré; you don’t know what to invent: between you you’ll kill me!” the girl declared. “I think there’s a secret league between you to spoil my voice, or at least to weaken my wind, before I get it. But à la guerre comme à la guerre! How can I read Shelley, however, when I don’t understand him?”
     “That’s just what I want to make you do. It’s a part of your general training. You may do without that, of course – without culture and taste and perception; but in that case you’ll be nothing but a vulgar cabotine, and nothing will be of any consequence.” Sherringham had a theory that the great lyric poets (he induced her to read and recite as well long passages of Wordsworth and of Swinburne) would teach her many of the secrets of competent utterance, the mysteries of rhythm, the communicableness of style, the latent music of the language and the art of ‘composing’ copious speeches and of keeping her wind in hand. He held in perfect sincerity that there was an indirect enlightenment which would be of the highest importance to her and to which it was precisely, by good fortune, in his power to contribute. She would do better in proportion as she had more knowledge – even knowledge that might appear to have but a remote connection with her business. The actor’s talent was essentially a gift, a thing by itself, implanted, instinctive, accidental, equally unconnected with intellect and with virtue – Sherringham was completely of that opinion; but it seemed to him no contradiction to consider at the same time that intellect (leaving virtue, for the moment, out of the question) might be brought into fruitful relation with it. It would be a larger thing if a better mind were projected upon it – without sacrificing the mind. So he lent Miriam books which she never read (she was on almost irreconcilable terms with the printed page), and in the long summer days, when he had leisure, took her to the Louvre to admire the great works of painting and sculpture. Here, as on all occasions, he was struck with the queer jumble of her taste, her mixture of intelligence and puerility. He saw that she never read what he gave her, though she sometimes would have liked him to suppose so; but in the presence of famous pictures and statues she had remarkable flashes of perception. She felt these things, she liked them, though it was always because she had an idea she could use them. The idea was often fantastic, but it showed what an eye she had to her business. “I could look just like that, if I tried.”  “That’s the dress I mean to wear when I do Portia.” Such were the observations that were apt to drop from her under the suggestion of antique marbles or when she stood before a Titian or a Bronzino.
     When she uttered them, and many others besides, the effect was sometimes irritating to Sherringham, who had to reflect a little to remember that she was no more egotistical than the histrionic conscience demanded. He wondered if there were necessarily something vulgar in the histrionic conscience – something condemned to feel only the tricky personal question. Wasn’t it better to be perfectly stupid than to have only one eye open and wear forever, in the great face of the world, the expression of a knowing wink? At the theatre, on the numerous July evenings when the Comédie Française played the repertory, with exponents determined the more sparse and provincial audience should thrill and gape with the tradition, her appreciation was tremendously technical and showed it was not for nothing she was now in and out of Madame Carré’s innermost counsels. But there were moments when even her very acuteness seemed to him to drag the matter down, to see it in a small and superficial sense. What he flattered himself that he was trying to do for her (and through her for the stage of his time, since she was the instrument, and incontestably a fine one, that had come to his hand) was precisely to lift it up, make it rare, keep it in the region of distinction and breadth. However, she was doubtless right and he was wrong, he eventually reasoned: you could afford to be vague only if you hadn’t a responsibility. He had fine ideas, but she was to do the acting, that is the application of them, and not he; and application was always of necessity a sort of vulgarization, a smaller thing than theory. If some day she should exhibit the great art that it was not purely fanciful to forecast for her, the subject would doubtless be sufficiently lifted up and it wouldn’t matter that some of the onward steps should have been lame.
     This was clear to him on several occasions when she repeated or acted something for him better than usual: then she quite carried him away, making him wish to ask no more questions but only let her disembroil herself in her own fashion. In these hours she gave him fitfully but forcibly that impression of beauty which was to be her justification. It was too soon for any general estimate of her progress; Madame Carré had at last given her an intelligent understanding, as well as a sore personal sense, of how bad she was. She had therefore begun on a new basis; she had returned to the alphabet and the drill. It was a phase of awkwardness, like the splashing of a young swimmer, but buoyancy would certainly come out of it. For the present there was for the most part no great alteration of the fact that when she did things according to her own idea they were not as yet, and seriously judged, worth the devil, as Madame Carré said; and when she did them according to that of her instructress they were too apt to be a gross parody of that lady’s intention. None the less she gave glimpses, and her glimpses made him feel not only that she was not a fool (that was a small relief), but that he was not.
     He made her stick to her English and read Shakespeare aloud to him. Mrs Rooth had recognized the importance of an apartment in which they should be able to receive so beneficent a visitor, and was now mistress of a small salon with a balcony and a rickety flower-stand (to say nothing of a view of many roofs and chimneys), a crooked waxed floor, an empire clock, an armoire à glace (highly convenient for Miriam’s posturings), and several cupboard doors, covered over, allowing for treacherous gaps, with the faded magenta paper of the wall. The thing had been easily done, for Sherringham had said: “Oh, we must have a sitting-room for our studies, you know. I’ll settle it with the landlady.” Mrs Rooth had liked his ‘we’ (indeed she liked everything about him), and he saw in this way that she had no insuperable objection to being under a pecuniary obligation so long as it was distinctly understood to be temporary. That he should have his money back with interest as soon as Miriam was launched was a comfort so deeply implied that it only added to intimacy. The window stood open on the little balcony, and when the sun had left it Sherringham and Miriam could linger there, leaning on the rail and talking, above the great hum of Paris, with nothing but the neighbouring tiles and tall tubes to take account of. Mrs Rooth, in limp garments, much ungirdled, was on the sofa with a novel, making good her frequent assertion that she could put up with any life that would yield her these two articles. There were romantic works that Sherringham had never read, and as to which he had vaguely wondered to what class they were addressed – the earlier productions of M. Eugène Sue, the once-fashionable compositions of Madame Sophie Gay – with which Mrs Rooth was familiar and which she was ready to peruse once more if she could get nothing fresher. She had always a greasy volume tucked under her while her nose was bent upon the pages in hand. She scarcely looked up even when Miriam lifted her voice to show Sherringham what she could do. These tragic or pathetic notes all went out of the window and mingled with the undecipherable concert of Paris, so that no neighbour was disturbed by them. The girl shrieked and wailed when the occasion required it, and Mrs Rooth only turned her page, showing in this way a great æsthetic as well as a great personal trust.
     She rather annoyed Sherringham by the serenity of her confidence (for a reason that he fully understood only later), save when Miriam caught an effect or a tone so well that she made him, in the pleasure of it, forget her parent was there. He continued to object to the girl’s English, with the foreign patches which might pass in prose but were offensive in the recitation of verse, and he wanted to know why she could not speak like her mother. He had to do Mrs Rooth the justice of recognizing the charm of her voice and accent, which gave a certain richness even to the foolish things she said. They were of an excellent insular tradition, full both of natural and of cultivated sweetness, and they puzzled him when other indications seemed to betray her – to relegate her to the class of the simple dreary. They were like the reverberation of far-off drawing-rooms.
     The connection between the development of Miriam’s genius and the necessity of an occasional excursion to the country – the charming country that lies in so many directions beyond the Parisian banlieue – would not have been immediately apparent to a merely superficial observer; but a day, and then another, at Versailles, a day at Fontainebleau and a trip, particularly harmonious and happy, to Rambouillet, took their place in Sherringham’s programme as a part of the legitimate indirect culture, an agency in the formation of taste. Intimations of the grand style, for instance, would proceed in abundance from the symmetrical palace and gardens of Louis XIV. Sherringham was very fond of Versailles, and went there more than once with the ladies of the Hôtel de la Garonne. They chose quiet hours, when the fountains were dry; and Mrs Rooth took an armful of novels and sat on a bench in the park, flanked by clipped hedges and old statues, while her young companions strolled away, walked to the Trianon, explored the long, straight vistas of the woods. Rambouillet was vague and pleasant and idle; they had an idea that they found suggestive associations there; and indeed there was an old white château which contained nothing else. They found, at any rate, luncheon and, in the landscape, a charming sense of summer and of little brushed French pictures.
     I have said that in these days Sherringham wondered a good deal, and by the time his leave of absence was granted him this practice had engendered a particular speculation. He was surprised that he was not in love with Miriam Rooth, and he considered in moments of leisure the causes of his exemption. He had perceived from the first that she was a ‘nature’, and each time she met his eyes the more vividly it appeared to him that her beauty was rare. You had to get the view of her face, but when you did so it was a splendid mobile mask. And the possessor of this high advantage had frankness and courage and variety and the unusual and the unexpected. She had qualities that seldom went together – impulses and shynesses, audacities and lapses, something coarse, popular and strong, all intermingled with disdains and languors and nerves. And then, above all, she was there, she was accessible, she almost belonged to him. He reflected ingeniously that he owed his escape to a peculiar cause – the fact that they had together a positive outside object. Objective, as it were, was all their communion; not personal and selfish, but a matter of art and business and discussion. Discussion had saved him and would save him further; for they would always have something to quarrel about. Sherringham, who was not a diplomatist for nothing, who had his reasons for steering straight and wished neither to deprive the British public of a rising star nor to change his actual situation for that of a conjugal impresario, blessed the beneficence, the salubrity, the pure exorcism of art. At the same time, rather inconsistently and feeling that he had a completer vision than before of the odd animal the artist who happened to have been born a woman, he felt himself warned against a serious connection (he made a great point of the ‘serious’) with so slippery and ticklish a creature. The two ladies had only to stay in Paris, save their candle-ends and, as Madame Carré had enjoined, practise their scales: there were apparently no autumn visits to English country-houses in prospect for Mrs Rooth.
     Sherringham parted with them on the understanding that in London he would look as thoroughly as possible into the question of an engagement for Miriam. The day before he began his holiday he went to see Madame Carré, who said to him: “Vous devriez bien nous la laisser.”
     “She has got something, then?”
     “She has got most things. She’ll go far. It is the first time I ever was mistaken. But don’t tell her so – I don’t flatter her; she’ll be too puffed up.”
     “Is she very conceited?” Sherringham asked.
     “Mauvais sujet!” said Madame Carré.
     It was on the journey to London that he indulged in some of those questionings of his state which I have mentioned; but I must add that by the time he reached Charing Cross (he smoked a cigar, deferred till after the Channel, in a compartment by himself) it suddenly came over him that they were futile. Now that he had left the girl, a subversive, unpremeditated heart-beat told him – it made him hold his breath a minute in the carriage – that he had after all not escaped. He was in love with her: he had been in love with her from the first hour.

     The next morning brought Nick Dormer many letters and telegrams, and his coffee was placed beside him in his room, where he remained until noon answering these communications. When he came out he learned that his mother and sisters had left the house. This information was given him by Mrs Gresham, whom he found dealing with her own voluminous budget at one of the tables in the library. She was a lady who received thirty letters a day, the subject-matter of which, as well as of her punctual answers, in a hand that would have been ‘lady-like’ in a manageress, was a puzzle to those who observed her.
     She told Nick that Lady Agnes had not been willing to disturb him at his work to say good-bye, knowing she should see him in a day or two in town. Nick was amused at the way his mother had stolen off; as if she feared that further conversation might weaken the spell she believed herself to have wrought. The place was cleared, moreover, of its other visitors, so that, as Mrs Gresham said, the fun was at an end. This lady expressed the idea that the fun was after all rather heavy. At any rate now they could rest, Mrs Dallow and Nick and she, and she was glad Nick was going to stay for a little quiet. She liked Harsh best when it was not en fête: then one could see what a sympathetic old place it was. She hoped Nick was not dreadfully tired; she feared Julia was completely done up. Mrs Dallow, however, had transported her exhaustion to the grounds – she was wandering about somewhere. She thought more people would be coming to the house, people from the town, people from the country, and had gone out so as not to have to see them. She had not gone far – Nick could easily find her. Nick intimated that he himself was not eager for more people, whereupon Mrs Gresham said, rather archly smiling:
     “And of course you hate me for being here!” He made some protest, and she added: “But I’m almost a part of the house, you know – I’m one of the chairs or tables.” Nick declared that he had never seen a house so well furnished, and Mrs Gresham said: “I believe there are to be some people to dinner: rather an interference, isn’t it? Julia lives so in public. But it’s all for you.” And after a moment she added: “It’s a wonderful constitution.” Nick at first failed to seize her allusion – he thought it a retarded political reference, a sudden tribute to the great unwritten instrument by which they were all governed. He was on the point of saying: “The British? Wonderful!” when he perceived that the intention of his interlocutress was to praise Mrs Dallow’s fine robustness. “The surface so delicate, the action so easy, yet the frame of steel.”
     Nick left Mrs Gresham to her correspondence and went out of the house; wondering as he walked whether she wanted him to do the same thing that his mother wanted, so that her words had been intended for a prick – whether even the two ladies had talked over their desire together. Mrs Gresham was a married woman who was usually taken for a widow; mainly because she was perpetually ‘sent for’ by her friends, and her friends never sent for Mr Gresham. She came in every case and had the air of being répandue at the expense of dingier belongings. Her figure was admired – that is it was sometimes mentioned – and she dressed as if it was expected of her to be smart, like a young woman in a shop or a servant much in view. She slipped in and out, accompanied at the piano, talked to the neglected visitors, walked in the rain and, after the arrival of the post, usually had conferences with her hostess, during which she stroked her chin and looked familiarly responsible. It was her peculiarity that people were always saying things to her in a lowered voice. She had all sorts of acquaintances and in small establishments she sometimes wrote the menus. Great ones, on the other hand, had no terrors for her: she had seen too many. No one had ever discovered whether any one else paid her.
     If Lady Agnes, in a lowered tone, had discussed with her the propriety of a union between the mistress of Harsh and the hope of the Dormers our young man could take the circumstance for granted without irritation and even with cursory indulgence: for he was not unhappy now and his spirit was light and clear. The summer day was splendid and the world, as he looked at it from the terrace, offered no more worrying ambiguity than a vault of airy blue arching over a lap of solid green. The wide, still trees in the park appeared to be waiting for some daily inspection, and the rich fields, with their official frill of hedges, to rejoice in the light which approved them as named and numbered acres. The place looked happy to Nick, and he was struck with its having a charm to which he had perhaps not hitherto done justice; something of the impression that he had received, when he was younger, from showy ‘views’ of fine country-seats, as if they had been brighter and more established than life. There were a couple of peacocks on the terrace, and his eye was caught by the gleam of the swans on a distant lake, where there was also a little temple on an island; and these objects fell in with his humour, which at another time might have been ruffled by them as representing the Philistine in ornament.
     It was certainly a proof of youth and health on his part that his spirits had risen as the tumult rose and that after he had taken his jump into the turbid waters of a contested election he had been able to tumble and splash, not only with a sense of awkwardness but with a considerable capacity for the frolic. Tepid as we saw him in Paris he had found his relation to his opportunity surprisingly altered by his little journey across the Channel. He saw things in a new perspective and he breathed an air that excited him unexpectedly. There was something in it that went to his head – an element that his mother and his sisters, his father from beyond the grave, Julia Dallow, the Liberal party and a hundred friends were both secretly and overtly occupied in pumping into it. If he was vague about success he liked the fray, and he had a general rule that when one was in a muddle there was refreshment in action. The embarrassment, that is the revival of scepticism, which might produce an inconsistency shameful to exhibit and yet very difficult to conceal, was safe enough to come later: indeed at the risk of making our young man appear a purely whimsical personage I may hint that some such sickly glow had even now begun to colour one quarter of his mental horizon.
     I am afraid moreover that I have no better excuse for him than the one he had touched on in the momentous conversation with his mother which I have thought it useful to reproduce in full. He was conscious of a double nature; there were two men in him, quite separate, whose leading features had little in common and each of whom insisted on having an independent turn at life. Meanwhile if he was adequately aware that the bed of his moral existence would need a good deal of making over if he was to lie upon it without unseemly tossing, he was also alive to the propriety of not parading his inconsistencies, not letting his unrectified interests become a spectacle to the vulgar. He had none of that wish to appear complicated which is at the bottom of most forms of fatuity; he was perfectly willing to pass as simple; he only aspired to be continuous. If you were not really simple this presented difficulties; but he would have assented to the proposition that you must be as final as you can and that it contributes much to finality to consume the smoke of your inner fire. The fire was the great thing and not the chimney. He had no view of life which counted out the need of learning; it was teaching rather as to which he was conscious of no particular mission. He liked life, liked it immensely, and was willing to study the ways and means of it with a certain patience. He cherished the usual wise monitions, such as that one was not to make a fool of one’s self and that one should not carry on one’s technical experiments in public. It was because as yet he liked life in general better than it was clear to him that he liked any particular branch of it, that on the occasion of a constituency’s holding out a cordial hand to him, while it extended another in a different direction, a certain bloom of boyhood that was on him had not resisted the idea of a match.
     He rose to it as he had risen to matches at school, for his boyishness could take a pleasure in an inconsiderate show of agility. He could meet electors and conciliate bores and compliment women and answer questions and roll off speeches and chaff adversaries, because it was amusing and slightly dangerous, like playing football or ascending an Alp – pastimes for which nature had conferred on him an aptitude not so very different in kind from a gallant readiness on platforms. There were two voices which told him that all this was not really action at all, but only a pusillanimous imitation of it: one of them made itself fitfully audible in the depths of his own spirit and the other spoke, in the equivocal accents of a very crabbed hand, from a letter of four pages by Gabriel Nash. However, Nick acted as much as possible under the circumstances, and that was rectifying – it brought with it enjoyment and a working faith. He had not gone counter to the axiom that in a case of doubt one was to hold off; for that applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it and that if there was essentially a problem in his life it would only grow tougher with keeping. But if doing one’s sum to-morrow instead of to-day does not make the sum easier it at least makes to-day so.
     Sometimes in the course of the following fortnight it seemed to him that he had gone in for Harsh because he was sure he should lose; sometimes he foresaw that he should win precisely to punish him for having tried and for his want of candour; and when presently he did win he was almost frightened at his success. Then it appeared to him that he had done something even worse than not choose – he had let others choose for him. The beauty of it was that they had chosen with only their own object in their eye: for what did they know about his strange alternative? He was rattled about so for a fortnight (Julia took care of that) that he had no time to think save when he tried to remember a quotation or an American story, and all his life became an overflow of verbiage. Thought retreated before increase of sound, which had to be pleasant and eloquent, and even superficially coherent, without its aid. Nick himself was surprised at the airs he could play; and often when the last thing at night he shut the door of his room he mentally exclaimed that he had had no idea he was such a mountebank.
     I must add that if this reflection did not occupy him long, and if no meditation, after his return from Paris, held him for many moments, there was a reason better even than that he was tired or busy or excited by the agreeable combination of hits and hurrahs. That reason was simply Mrs Dallow, who had suddenly become a still larger fact in his consciousness than active politics. She was, indeed, active politics; that is, if the politics were his, how little soever, the activity was hers. She had ways of showing she was a clever woman that were better than saying clever things, which only prove at the most that one would be clever if one could. The accomplished fact itself was the demonstration that Mrs Dallow could; and when Nick came to his senses after the proclamation of the victor and the cessation of the noise her figure was, of all the queer phantasmagoria, the most substantial thing that survived. She had been always there, passing, repassing, before him, beside him, behind him. She had made the business infinitely prettier than it would have been without her, added music and flowers and ices, a charm, and converted it into a social game that had a strain of the heroic. It was a garden-party with something at stake, or to celebrate something in advance, with the people let in. The concluded affair had bequeathed him not only a seat in the House of Commons, but a perception of what women may do in high embodiments, and an abyss of intimacy with one woman in particular.
     She had wrapped him up in something, he didn’t know what – a sense of facility, an overpowering fragrance – and they had moved together in an immense fraternity. There had been no love-making, no contact that was only personal, no vulgarity of flirtation: the hurry of the days and the sharpness with which they both tended to an outside object had made all that irrelevant. It was as if she had been too near for him to see her separate from himself; but none the less, when he now drew breath and looked back, what had happened met his eyes as a composed picture – a picture of which the subject was inveterately Julia and her ponies: Julia wonderfully fair and fine, holding her head more than ever in the manner characteristic of her, brilliant, benignant, waving her whip, cleaving the crowd, thanking people with her smile, carrying him beside her, carrying him to his doom. He had not supposed that in so few days he had driven about with her so much; but the image of it was there, in his consulted conscience, as well as in a personal glow not yet chilled: it looked large as it rose before him. The things his mother had said to him made a rich enough frame for it, and the whole impression, that night, had kept him much awake.

     While, after leaving Mrs Gresham, he was hesitating which way to go and was on the point of hailing a gardener to ask if Mrs Dallow had been seen, he noticed, as a spot of colour in an expanse of shrubbery, a far-away parasol moving in the direction of the lake. He took his course that way, across the park, and as the bearer of the parasol was strolling slowly it was not five minutes before he had joined her. He went to her soundlessly over the grass (he had been whistling at first, but as he got nearer he stopped), and it was not till he was close to her that she looked round. He had watched her moving as if she were turning things over in her mind, brushing the smooth walks and the clean turf with her dress, slowly making her parasol revolve on her shoulder and carrying in the hand which hung beside her a book which he perceived to be a monthly review.
     “I came out to get away,” she remarked when he had begun to walk with her.
     “Away from me?”
     “Ah, that’s impossible,” said Mrs Dallow. Then she added: “The day is so nice.”
     “Lovely weather,” Nick dropped. “You want to get away from Mrs Gresham, I suppose.”
     Mrs Dallow was silent a moment. “From everything!”
     “Well, I want to get away too.”
     “It has been such a racket. Listen to the dear birds.”
     “Yes, our noise isn’t so good as theirs,” said Nick. “I feel as if I had been married and had shoes and rice thrown after me,” he went on. “But not to you, Julia – nothing so good as that.”
     Mrs Dallow made no answer to this; she only turned her eyes on the ornamental water which stretched away at their right. In a moment she exclaimed: “How nasty the lake looks!” and Nick recognized in the tone of the words a manifestation of that odd shyness – a perverse stiffness at a moment when she probably only wanted to be soft – which, taken in combination with her other qualities, was so far from being displeasing to him that it represented her nearest approach to extreme charm. He was not shy now, for he considered, this morning, that he saw things very straight and in a sense altogether superior and delightful. This enabled him to be generously sorry for his companion, if he were the reason of her being in any degree uncomfortable, and yet left him to enjoy the prettiness of some of the signs by which her discomfort was revealed. He would not insist on anything yet: so he observed that his cousin’s standard in lakes was too high, and then talked a little about his mother and the girls, their having gone home, his not having seen them that morning, Lady Agnes’s deep satisfaction in his victory and the fact that she would be obliged to ‘do something’ for the autumn – take a house or something.
     “I’ll lend her a house,” said Mrs Dallow.
     “Oh, Julia, Julia!” Nick exclaimed.
     But Mrs Dallow paid no attention to his exclamation; she only held up her review and said: “See what I have brought with me to read – Mr Hoppus’s article.”
     “That’s right; then I shan’t have to. You’ll tell me about it.” He uttered this without believing that she had meant or wished to read the article, which was entitled ‘The Revision of the British Constitution’, in spite of her having encumbered herself with the stiff, fresh magazine. He was conscious that she was not in want of such mental occupation as periodical literature could supply. They walked along and then he added: “But is that what we are in for – reading Mr Hoppus? Is that the sort of thing our constituents expect? Or even worse, pretending to have read him when one hasn’t? Oh, what a tangled web we weave!”
     “People are talking about it. One has to know. It’s the article of the month.”
     Nick looked at his companion askance a moment. “You say things every now and then for which I could kill you. ‘The article of the month’, for instance: I could kill you for that.”
     “Well, kill me!” Mrs Dallow exclaimed.
     “Let me carry your book,” Nick rejoined, irrelevantly. The hand in which she held it was on the side of her on which he was walking, and he put out his own hand to take it. But for a couple of minutes she forbore to give it up, and they held it together, swinging it a little. Before she surrendered it he inquired where she was going.
     “To the island,” she answered.
     “Well, I’ll go with you – I’ll kill you there.”
     “The things I say are the right things,” said Mrs Dallow.
     “It’s just the right things that are wrong. It’s because you’re so political,” Nick went on. “It’s your horrible ambition. The woman who has a salon should have read the article of the month. See how one dreadful thing leads to another.”
     “There are some things that lead to nothing.”
     “No doubt – no doubt. And how are you going to get over to your island?”
     “I don’t know.”
     “Isn’t there a boat?”
     “I don’t know.”
     Nick had paused a moment, to look round for the boat, but Mrs Dallow walked on without turning her head. “Can you row?” her companion asked.
     “Don’t you know I can do everything?”
     “Yes, to be sure. That’s why I want to kill you. There’s the boat.”
     “Shall you drown me?”
     “Oh, let me perish with you!” Nick answered with a sigh. The boat had been hidden from them by the bole of a great tree, which rose from the grass at the water’s-edge. It was moored to a small place of embarkation and was large enough to hold as many persons as were likely to wish to visit at once the little temple in the middle of the lake, which Nick liked because it was absurd and Mrs Dallow had never had a particular esteem for. The lake, fed by a natural spring, was a liberal sheet of water, measured by the scale of park scenery; and though its principal merit was that, taken at a distance, it gave a gleam of abstraction to the concrete verdure, doing the office of an open eye in a dull face, it could also be approached without derision on a sweet summer morning, when it made a lapping sound and reflected candidly various things that were probably finer than itself – the sky, the great trees, the flight of birds.
     A man of taste, a hundred years before, coming back from Rome, had caused a small ornamental structure to be erected, on artificial foundations, on its bosom, and had endeavoured to make this architectural pleasantry as nearly as possible a reminiscence of the small ruined rotunda which stands on the bank of the Tiber and is declared by ciceroni to have been dedicated to Vesta. It was circular, it was roofed with old tiles, it was surrounded by white columns and it was considerably dilapidated. George Dallow had taken an interest in it (it reminded him not in the least of Rome, but of other things that he liked), and had amused himself with restoring it.
     “Give me your hand; sit there, and I’ll ferry you,” Nick Dormer said.
     Mrs Dallow complied, placing herself opposite to him in the boat; but as he took up the paddles she declared that she preferred to remain on the water – there was too much malice prepense in the temple. He asked her what she meant by that, and she said it was ridiculous to withdraw to an island a few feet square on purpose to meditate. She had nothing to meditate about which required so much attitude.
     “On the contrary, it would be just to change the pose. It’s what we have been doing for a week that’s attitude; and to be for half an hour where nobody’s looking and one hasn’t to keep it up is just what I wanted to put in an idle, irresponsible day for. I am not keeping it up now – I suppose you’ve noticed,” Nick went on, as they floated and he scarcely dipped the oars.
     “I don’t understand you,” said Mrs Dallow, leaning back in the boat.
     Nick gave no further explanation than to ask in a minute: “Have you people to dinner to-night?”
     “I believe there are three or four, but I’ll put them off if you like.”
     “Must you always live in public, Julia?” Nick continued.
     She looked at him a moment, and he could see that she coloured slightly. “We’ll go home – I’ll put them off.”
     “Ah no, don’t go home; it’s too jolly here. Let them come – let them come, poor wretches!”
     “How little you know me, when, ever so many times, I have lived here for months without a creature.”
     “Except Mrs Gresham, I suppose.”
     “I have had to have the house going, I admit.”
     “You are perfect, you are admirable, and I don’t criticize you.”
     “I don’t understand you!” she tossed back.
     “That only adds to the generosity of what you have done for me,” Nick returned, beginning to pull faster. He bent over the oars and sent the boat forward, keeping this up for ten minutes, during which they both remained silent. His companion, in her place, motionless, reclining (the seat in the stern was very comfortable), looked only at the water, the sky, the trees. At last Nick headed for the little temple, saying first however: “Sha’n’t we visit the ruin?”
     “If you like. I don’t mind seeing how they keep it.”
     They reached the white steps which led up to it. Nick held the boat and Mrs Dallow got out. He fastened the boat and they went up the steps together, passing through the open door.
     “They keep it very well,” Nick said, looking round. “It’s a capital place to give up everything.”
     “It might do for you to explain what you mean,” said Julia, sitting down.
     “I mean to pretend for half an hour that I don’t represent the burgesses of Harsh. It’s charming – it’s very delicate work. Surely it has been retouched.”
     The interior of the pavilion, lighted by windows which the circle of columns was supposed, outside and at a distance, to conceal, had a vaulted ceiling and was occupied by a few pieces of last-century furniture, spare and faded, of which the colours matched with the decoration of the walls. These and the ceiling, tinted and not exempt from indications of damp, were covered with fine mouldings and medallions. It was a very elegant little tea-house.
     Mrs Dallow sat on the edge of a sofa, rolling her parasol and remarking: “You ought to read Mr Hoppus’s article to me.”
     “Why, is this your salon?” asked Nick, smiling.
     “Why are you always talking of that? It’s an invention of your own.”
     “But isn’t it the idea you care most about?”
     Suddenly, nervously, Mrs Dallow put up her parasol and sat under it, as if she were not quite sensible of what she was doing. “How much you know me! I don’t care about anything – that you will ever guess.”
     Nick Dormer wandered about the room, looking at various things it contained – the odd volumes on the tables, the bits of quaint china on the shelves. “They keep it very well; you’ve got charming things.”
     “They’re supposed to come over every day and look after them.”
     “They must come over in force.”
     “Oh, no one knows.”
     “It’s spick and span. How well you have everything done!”
     “I think you’ve some reason to say so,” said Mrs Dallow. Her parasol was down and she was again rolling it tight.
     “But you’re right about my not knowing you. Why were you so ready to do so much for me?”
     He stopped in front of her and she looked up at him. Her eyes rested on his a minute; the then she broke out: “Why do you hate me so?”
     “Was it because you like me personally?” Nick asked. “You may think that an odd, or even an odious question; but isn’t it natural, my wanting to know?”
     “Oh, if you don’t know!” Mrs Dallow exclaimed.
     “It’s a question of being sure.”
     “Well, then, if you’re not sure—”
     “Was it done for me as a friend, as a man?”
     “You’re not a man; you’re a child,” said his hostess, with a face that was cold, though she had been smiling the moment before.
     “After all, I was a good candidate,” Nick went on.
     “What do I care for candidates?”
     “You’re the most delightful woman, Julia,” said Nick, sitting down beside her, “and I can’t imagine what you mean by my hating you.”
     “If you haven’t discovered that I like you, you might as well.”
     “Might as well discover it?”
     Mrs Dallow was grave; he had never seen her so pale and never so beautiful. She had stopped rolling her parasol now: her hands were folded in her lap and her eyes were bent on them. Nick sat looking at them too, a trifle awkwardly. “Might as well have hated me,” said Mrs Dallow.
     “We have got on so beautifully together, all these days: why shouldn’t we get on as well forever and ever?” Mrs Dallow made no answer, and suddenly Nick said to her: “Ah, Julia, I don’t know what you have done to me, but you’ve done it. You’ve done it by strange ways, but it will serve. Yes, I hate you,” he added, in a different tone, with his face nearer to hers.
     “Dear Nick – dear Nick—” she began. But she stopped, for she suddenly felt that he was altogether nearer, nearer than he had ever been to her before, that his arm was round her, that he was in possession of her. She closed her eyes but she heard him ask: “Why shouldn’t it be forever, forever?” in a voice that had, for her ear, such a vibration as no voice had ever had.
     “You’ve done it – you’ve done it,” Nick repeated.
     “What do you want of me?” she demanded.
     “To stay with me, this way, always.”
     “Ah, not this way,” she answered, softly, but as if in pain, and making an effort, with a certain force, to detach herself.
     “This way, then – or this!” He took such insistent advantage of her that he had quickly kissed her. She rose as quickly, but he held her yet, and while he did so he said to her in the same tender tone: “If you’ll marry me, why shouldn’t it be so simple, so good?” He drew her closer again, too close for her to answer. But her struggle ceased and she rested upon him for a minute, she buried her face on his breast.
     “You’re hard, and it’s cruel!” she then exclaimed, breaking away.
     “Hard – cruel?”
     “You do it with so little!” And with this, unexpectedly to Nick, Mrs Dallow burst straight into tears. Before he could stop her she was at the door of the pavilion, as if she wished to quit it immediately. There, however, he stopped her, bending over her while she sobbed, unspeakably gentle with her.
     “So little? It’s with everything – with everything I have.”
     “I have done it, you say? What do you accuse me of doing?” Her tears were already over.
     “Of making me yours; of being so precious, Julia, so exactly what a man wants, as it seems to me. I didn’t know you could,” he went on, smiling down at her. “I didn’t – no, I didn’t.”
     “It’s what I say – that you’ve always hated me.”
     “I’ll make it up to you.”
     She leaned on the doorway with her head against the lintel. “You don’t even deny it.”
     “Contradict you now? I’ll admit it, though it’s rubbish, on purpose to live it down.”
     “It doesn’t matter,” she said, slowly; “for however much you might have liked me, you would never have done so half as much as I have cared for you.”
     “Oh, I’m so poor!” Nick murmured, cheerfully.
     She looked at him, smiling, and slowly shook her head. Then she declared: “You never can.”
     “I like that! Haven’t I asked you to marry me? When did you ever ask me?”
     “Every day of my life! As I say, it’s hard – for a proud woman.”
     “Yes, you’re too proud even to answer me.”
     “We must think of it, we must talk of it.”
     “Think of it? I’ve thought of it ever so much.”
     “I mean together. There are things to be said.”
     “The principal thing is to give me your word.”
     Mrs Dallow looked at him in silence; then she exclaimed: “I wish I didn’t adore you!” She went straight down the steps.
     “You don’t, if you leave me now. Why do you go? It’s so charming here, and we are so delightfully alone.”
     “Detach the boat; we’ll go on the water,” said Mrs Dallow.
     Nick was at the top of the steps, looking down at her. “Ah, stay a little – do stay!” he pleaded.
     “I’ll get in myself, I’ll put off,” she answered.
     At this Nick came down and he bent a little to undo the rope. He was close to her, and as he raised his head he felt it caught; she had seized it in her hands and she pressed her lips to the first place they encountered. The next instant she was in the boat.
     This time he dipped the oars very slowly indeed; and while, for a period that was longer than it seemed to them, they floated vaguely, they mainly sat and glowed at each other, as if everything had been settled. There were reasons enough why Nick should be happy; but it is a singular fact that the leading one was the sense of having escaped from a great mistake. The final result of his mother’s appeal to him the day before had been the idea that he must act with unimpeachable honour. He was capable of taking it as an assurance that Julia had placed him under an obligation which a gentleman could regard only in one way. If she had understood it so, putting the vision, or at any rate the appreciation, of a closer tie into everything she had done for him, the case was conspicuously simple and his course unmistakably plain. That is why he had been gay when he came out of the house to look for her: he could be gay when his course was plain. He could be all the gayer, naturally, I must add, that in turning things over, as he had done half the night, what he had turned up oftenest was the recognition that Julia now had a new personal power over him. It was not for nothing that she had thrown herself personally into his life. She had by her act made him live twice as much, and such a service, if a man had accepted and deeply tasted it, was certainly a thing to put him on his honour. Nick gladly recognized that there was nothing he could do in preference that would not be spoiled for him by any deflection from that point. His mother had made him uncomfortable by intimating to him that Julia was in love with him (he didn’t like, in general, to be told such things); but the responsibility seemed easier to carry and he was less shy about it when once he was away from other eyes, with only Julia’s own to express that truth and with indifferent nature all around. Besides, what discovery had he made this morning but that he also was in love?
     “You must be a very great man,” she said to him, in the middle of the lake. “I don’t know what you mean about my salon; but I am ambitious.”
     “We must look at life in a large, bold way,” Nick replied, resting his oars.
     “That’s what I mean. If I didn’t think you could I wouldn’t look at you.”
     “I could what?”
     “Do everything you ought – everything I imagine, I dream of. You are clever: you can never make me believe the contrary, after your speech on Tuesday. Don’t speak to me! I’ve seen, I’ve heard and I know what’s in you. I shall hold you to it. You are everything that you pretend not to be.”
     Nick sat looking at the water while she talked. “Will it always be so amusing?” he asked.
     “Will what always be?”
     “Why, my career.”
     “Sha’n’t I make it so?”
     “It will be yours; it won’t be mine,” said Nick.
     “Ah, don’t say that: don’t make me out that sort of woman! If they should say it’s me, I’d drown myself.”
     “If they should say what’s you?”
     “Why, you’re getting on. If they should say I push you, that I do things for you.”
     “Well, won’t you do them? It’s just what I count on.”
     “Don’t be dreadful,” said Mrs Dallow. “It would be loathsome if I were said to be cleverer than you. That’s not the sort of man I want to marry.”
     “Oh, I shall make you work, my dear!”
     “Ah, that!” exclaimed Mrs Dallow, in a tone that might come back to a man in after years.
     “You will do the great thing, you will make my life delightful,” Nick declared, as if he fully perceived the sweetness of it. “I dare say that will keep me in heart.”
     “In heart? Why shouldn’t you be in heart?” Julia’s eyes, lingering on him, searching him, seemed to question him still more than her lips.
     “Oh, it will be all right!” cried Nick.
     “You’ll like success, as well as any one else. Don’t tell me – you’re not so ethereal!”
     “Yes, I shall like success.”
     “So shall I! And of course I am glad that you’ll be able to do things,” Mrs Dallow went on. “I’m glad you’ll have things. I’m glad I’m not poor.”
     “Ah, don’t speak of that,” Nick murmured. “Only be nice to my mother: we shall make her supremely happy.”
     “I’m glad I like your people,” Mrs Dallow dropped. “Leave them to me!”
     “You’re generous – you’re noble,” stammered Nick.
     “Your mother must live at Broadwood; she must have it for life. It’s not at all bad.”
     “Ah, Julia,” her companion replied, “it’s well I love you!”
     “Why shouldn’t you?” laughed Julia; and after this there was nothing said between them till the boat touched the shore. When she had got out Mrs Dallow remarked that it was time for luncheon; but they took no action in consequence, strolling in a direction which was not that of the house. There was a vista that drew them on, a grassy path skirting the foundations of scattered beeches and leading to a stile from which the charmed wanderer might drop into another division of Mrs Dallow’s property. This lady said something about their going as far as the stile; then the next instant she exclaimed: “How stupid of you – you’ve forgotten Mr Hoppus!”
     “We left him in the temple of Vesta. Darling, I had other things to think of there.”
     “I’ll send for him,” said Mrs Dallow.
     “Lord, can you think of him now?” Nick asked.
     “Of course I can – more than ever.”
     “Shall we go back for him?” Nick inquired, pausing.
     Mrs Dallow made no answer; she continued to walk, saying they would go as far as the stile. “Of course I know you’re fearfully vague,” she presently resumed.
     “I wasn’t vague at all. But you were in such a hurry to get away.”
     “It doesn’t signify. I have another one at home.”
     “Another summer-house?” suggested Nick.
     “A copy of Mr Hoppus.”
     “Mercy, how you go in for him! Fancy having two!”
     “He sent me the number of the magazine; and the other is the one that comes every month.”
     “Every month – I see,” said Nick, in a manner justifying considerably Mrs Dallow’s charge of vagueness. They had reached the stile and he leaned over it, looking at a great mild meadow and at the browsing beasts in the distance.
     “Did you suppose they come every day?” asked Mrs Dallow.
     “Dear no, thank God!” They remained there a little; he continued to look at the animals and before long he added: “Delightful English pastoral scene. Why do they say it won’t paint?”
     “Who says it won’t?”
     “I don’t know – some of them. It will in France; but somehow it won’t here.”
     “What are you talking about?” Mrs Dallow demanded.
     Nick appeared unable to satisfy her on this point; at any rate instead of answering her directly he said: “Is Broadwood very charming?”
     “Have you never been there? It shows how you’ve treated me. We used to go there in August. George had ideas about it,” added Mrs Dallow. She had never affected not to speak of her late husband, especially with Nick, whose kinsman in a manner he had been and who had liked him better than some others did.
     “George had ideas about a great many things.”
     Julia Dallow appeared to be conscious that it would be rather odd on such an occasion to take this up. It was even odd in Nick to have said it. “Broadwood is just right,” she rejoined at last. “It’s neither too small nor too big, and it takes care of itself. There’s nothing to be done: you can’t spend a penny.”
     “And don’t you want to use it?”
     “We can go and stay with them,” said Mrs Dallow.
     “They’ll think I bring them an angel.” And Nick covered her hand, which was resting on the stile, with his own large one.
     “As they regard you yourself as an angel they will take it as natural of you to associate with your kind.”
     “Oh, my kind!” murmured Nick, looking at the cows.
     Mrs Dallow turned away from him as if she were starting homeward, and he began to retrace his steps with her. Suddenly she said: “What did you mean that night in Paris?”
     “That night?”
     “When you came to the hotel with me, after we had all dined at that place with Peter.”
     “What did I mean?”
     “About your caring so much for the fine arts. You seemed to want to frighten me.”
     “Why should you have been frightened? I can’t imagine what I had in my head: not now.”
     “You are vague,” said Julia, with a little flush.
     “Not about the great thing.”
     “The great thing?”
     “That I owe you everything an honest man has to offer. How can I care about the fine arts now?”
     Mrs Dallow stopped, looking at him. “Is it because you think you owe it—” and she paused, still with the heightened colour in her cheek; then she went on – “that you have spoken to me as you did there?” She tossed her head towards the lake.
     “I think I spoke to you because I couldn’t help it.”
     “You are vague.” And Mrs Dallow walked on again.
     “You affect me differently from any other woman.”
     “Oh, other women! Why shouldn’t you care about the fine arts now?” she added.
     “There will be no time. All my days and my years will be none too much to do what you expect of me.”
     “I don’t expect you to give up anything. I only expect you to do more.”
     “To do more I must do less. I have no talent.”
     “No talent?”
     “I mean for painting.”
     Mrs Dallow stopped again. “That’s odious! You have – you must.”
     Nick burst out laughing. “You’re altogether delightful. But how little you know about it – about the honourable practice of any art!”
     “What do you call practice? You’ll have all our things – you’ll live in the midst of them.”
     “Certainly I shall enjoy looking at them, being so near them.”
     “Don’t say I’ve taken you away then.”
     “Taken me away?”
     “From the love of art. I like them myself now, poor George’s treasures. I didn’t, of old, so much, because it seemed to me he made too much of them – he was always talking.”
     “Well, I won’t talk,” said Nick.
     “You may do as you like – they’re yours.”
     “Give them to the nation,” Nick went on.
     “I like that! When we have done with them.”
     “We shall have done with them when your Vandykes and Moronis have cured me of the delusion that I may be of their family. Surely that won’t take long.”
     “You shall paint me,” said Julia.
     “Never, never, never!” Nick uttered these words in a tone that made his companion stare; and he appeared slightly embarrassed at this result of his emphasis. To relieve himself he said, as they had come back to the place beside the lake where the boat was moored: “Sha’n’t we really go and fetch Mr Hoppus?”
     She hesitated. “You may go; I won’t, please.”
     “That’s not what I want.”
     “Oblige me by going. I’ll wait here.” With which Mrs Dallow sat down on the bench attached to the little landing.
     Nick, at this, got into the boat and put off; he smiled at her as she sat there watching him. He made his short journey, disembarked and went into the pavilion; but when he came out with the object of his errand he saw that Mrs Dallow had quitted her station – she had returned to the house without him. He rowed back quickly, sprang ashore and followed her with long steps. Apparently she had gone fast; she had almost reached the door when he overtook her.
     “Why did you basely desert me?” he asked, stopping her there.
     “I don’t know. Because I’m so happy.”
     “May I tell mother?”
     “You may tell her she shall have Broadwood.”

     Nick lost no time in going down to see Mr Carteret, to whom he had written immediately after the election and who had answered him in twelve revised pages of historical parallel. He used often to envy Mr Carteret’s leisure, a sense of which came to him now afresh, in the summer evening, as he walked up the hill toward the quiet house where enjoyment, for him, had ever been mingled with a vague oppression. He was a little boy again, under Mr Carteret’s roof – a little boy on whom it had been duly impressed that in the wide, plain, peaceful rooms he was not to ‘touch’. When he paid a visit to his father’s old friend there were in fact many things – many topics – from which he instinctively kept his hands. Even Mr Chayter, the immemorial blank butler, who was so like his master that he might have been a twin brother, helped to remind him that he must be good. Mr Carteret seemed to Nick a very grave person, but he had the sense that Chayter thought him rather frivolous.
     Our young man always came on foot from the station, leaving his portmanteau to be carried: the direct way was steep and he liked the slow approach, which gave him a chance to look about the place and smell the new-mown hay. At this season the air was full of it – the fields were so near that it was in the small, empty streets. Nick would never have thought of rattling up to Mr Carteret’s door. It had an old brass plate with his name, as if he had been the principal surgeon. The house was in the high part, and the neat roofs of other houses, lower down the hill, made an immediate prospect for it, scarcely counting however, for the green country was just below these, familiar and interpenetrating, in the shape of small but thick-tufted gardens. There was something growing in all the intervals, and the only disorder of the place was that there were sometimes oats on the pavements. A crooked lane, very clean, with cobblestones, opened opposite to Mr Carteret’s house and wandered towards the old abbey: for the abbey was the secondary fact of Beauclere, after Mr Carteret. Mr Carteret sometimes went away and the abbey never did; yet somehow it was most of the essence of the place that it possessed the proprietor of the squarest of the square red houses, with the finest of the arched hall-windows, in three divisions, over the widest of the last-century doorways. You saw the great abbey from the doorstep, beyond the gardens of course, and in the stillness you could hear the flutter of the birds that circled round its huge, short towers. The towers had never been finished, save as time finishes things, by perpetuating their incompleteness. There is something right in old monuments that have been wrong for centuries: some such moral as that was usually in Nick’s mind as an emanation of Beauclere, when he looked at the magnificent line of the roof, riding the sky and unsurpassed for length.
     When the door with the brass plate was opened and Mr Chayter appeared in the middle distance (he always advanced just to the same spot, like a prime minister receiving an ambassador), Nick saw anew that he would be wonderfully like Mr Carteret if he had had an expression. He did not permit himself this freedom; never giving a sign of recognition, often as the young man had been at the house. He was most attentive to the visitor’s wants, but apparently feared that if he allowed a familiarity it might go too far. There was always the same question to be asked – had Mr Carteret finished his nap? He usually had not finished it, and this left Nick what he liked – time to smoke a cigarette in the garden or even, before dinner, to take a turn about the place. He observed now, every time he came, that Mr Carteret’s nap lasted a little longer. There was each year a little more strength to be gathered for the ceremony of dinner: this was the principal symptom – almost the only one – that the clear-cheeked old gentleman gave of not being so fresh as of yore. He was still wonderful for his age. To-day he was particularly careful: Chayter went so far as to mention to Nick that four gentlemen were expected to dinner – an effusiveness perhaps partly explained by the circumstance that Lord Bottomley was one of them.
     The prospect of Lord Bottomley was somehow not stirring; it only made the young man say to himself with a quick, thin sigh: “This time I am in for it!” And he immediately had the unpolitical sense again that there was nothing so pleasant as the way the quiet bachelor house had its best rooms on the big garden, which seemed to advance into them through their wide windows and ruralize their dullness.
     “I expect it will be a latish eight, sir,” said Mr Chayter, superintending in the library the production of tea on a large scale. Everything at Mr Carteret’s appeared to Nick to be on a larger scale than anywhere else – the tea-cups, the knives and forks, the door-handles, the chair-backs, the legs of mutton, the candles and the lumps of coal: they represented and apparently exhausted the master’s sense of pleasing effect, for the house was not otherwise decorated. Nick thought it really hideous, but he was capable at the same time of extracting a degree of amusement from anything that was strongly characteristic, and Mr Carteret’s interior expressed a whole view of life. Our young man was generous enough to find a hundred instructive intimations in it even at the time it came over him (as it always did at Beauclere) that this was the view he himself was expected to take. Nowhere were the boiled eggs at breakfast so big or in such big receptacles; his own shoes, arranged in his room, looked to him vaster there than at home. He went out into the garden and remembered what enormous strawberries they should have for dinner. In the house there was a great deal of Landseer, of oilcloth, of woodwork painted and ‘grained’.
     Finding that he should have time before the evening meal, or before Mr Carteret would be able to see him, he quitted the house and took a stroll toward the abbey. It covered acres of ground on the summit of the hill, and there were aspects in which its vast bulk reminded him of the ark left high and dry upon Ararat. At least it was the image of a great wreck, of the indestructible vessel of a faith, washed up there by a storm centuries before. The injury of time added to this appearance – the infirmities around which, as he knew, the battle of restoration had begun to be fought. The cry had been raised to save the splendid pile, and the counter-cry by the purists, the sentimentalists, whatever they were, to save it from being saved. They were all exchanging compliments in the morning papers.
     Nick sauntered round the church – it took a good while; he leaned against low things and looked up at it while he smoked another cigarette. It struck him as a great pity it should be touched: so much of the past was buried there that it was like desecrating, like digging up a grave. And the years seemed to be letting it down so gently: why jostle the elbow of slow-fingering time? The fading afternoon was exquisitely pure; the place was empty; he heard nothing but the cries of several children, which sounded sweet, who were playing on the flatness of the very old tombs. He knew that this would inevitably be one of the topics at dinner, the restoration of the abbey; it would give rise to a considerable deal of orderly debate. Lord Bottomley, oddly enough, would probably oppose the expensive project, but on grounds that would be characteristic of him even if the attitude were not. Nick’s nerves, on this spot, always knew what it was to be soothed; but he shifted his position with a slight impatience as the vision came over him of Lord Bottomley’s treating a question of æsthetics. It was enough to make one want to take the other side, the idea of having the same taste as his lordship: one would have it for such different reasons.
     Dear Mr Carteret would be deliberate and fair all round, and would, like his noble friend, exhibit much more architectural knowledge than he, Nick, possessed: which would not make it a whit less droll to our young man that an artistic idea, so little really assimilated, should be broached at that table and in that air. It would remain so outside of their minds and their minds would remain so outside of it. It would be dropped at last however, after half an hour’s gentle worrying, and the conversation would incline itself to public affairs. Mr Carteret would find his natural level – the production of anecdote in regard to the formation of early ministries. He knew more than any one else about the personages of whom certain cabinets would have consisted if they had not consisted of others. His favourite exercise was to illustrate how different everything might have been from what it was, and how the reason of the difference had always been somebody’s inability to ‘see his way’ to accept the view of somebody else – a view usually, at the time, discussed, in strict confidence, with Mr Carteret, who surrounded his actual violation of that confidence, thirty years later, with many precautions against scandal. In this retrospective vein, at the head of his table, the old gentleman always enjoyed an audience or at any rate commanded a silence, often profound. Every one left it to some one else to ask another question; and when by chance some one else did so every one was struck with admiration at any one’s being able to say anything. Nick knew the moment when he himself would take a glass of a particular port and, surreptitiously looking at his watch, perceive it was ten o’clock. It might as well be 1830.
     All this would be a part of the suggestion of leisure that invariably descended upon him at Beauclere – the image of a sloping shore where the tide of time broke with a ripple too faint to be a warning. But there was another admonition that was almost equally sure to descend upon his spirit in a summer hour, in a stroll about the grand abbey; to sink into it as the light lingered on the rough red walls and the local accent of the children sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of England – a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals of the place appeared to be in the air (foundations bafflingly early, a great monastic life, wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries, all cornfields and magistrates and vicars), and these things were connected with an emotion that arose from the green country, the rich land so infinitely lived in, and laid on him a hand that was too ghostly to press and yet somehow too urgent to be light. It produced a throb that he could not have spoken of, it was so deep, and that was half imagination and half responsibility. These impressions melted together and made a general appeal, of which, with his new honours as a legislator, he was the sentient subject. If he had a love for this particular scene of life, might it not have a love for him and expect something of him? What fate could be so high as to grow old in a national affection? What a grand kind of reciprocity, making mere soreness of all the balms of indifference!
     The great church was still open, and he turned into it and wandered a little in the twilight, which had gathered earlier there. The whole structure, with its immensity of height and distance, seemed to rest on tremendous facts – facts of achievement and endurance – and the huge Norman pillars to loom through the dimness like the ghosts of heroes. Nick was more struck with its human than with its divine significance, and he felt the oppression of his conscience as he walked slowly about. It was in his mind that nothing in life was really clear, all things were mingled and charged, and that patriotism might be an uplifting passion even if it had to allow for Lord Bottomley and for Mr Carteret’s blindness on certain sides. Presently he perceived it was nearly half-past seven, and as he went back to his old friend’s he could not have told you whether he was in a state of gladness or of gloom.
     “Mr Carteret will be in the drawing-room at a quarter to eight, sir,” Chayter said; and Nick, as he went to his chamber, asked himself what was the use of being a member of Parliament if one was still sensitive to an intimation on the part of such a functionary that one ought really to have begun to dress. Chayter’s words meant that Mr Carteret would expect to have a little comfortable conversation with him before dinner. Nick’s usual rapidity in dressing was however quite adequate to the occasion, and his host had not appeared when he went down. There were flowers in the unfeminine saloon, which contained several paintings, in addition to the engravings of pictures of animals; but nothing could prevent its reminding Nick of a comfortable committee-room.
     Mr Carteret presently came in, with his gold-headed stick, a laugh like a series of little warning coughs and the air of embarrassment that our young man always perceived in him at first. He was nearly eighty, but he was still shy – he laughed a great deal, faintly and vaguely, at nothing, as if to make up for the seriousness with which he took some jokes. He always began by looking away from his interlocutor, and it was only little by little that his eyes came round; after which their limpid and benevolent blue made you wonder why they should ever be circumspect. He was clean shaven and had a long upper lip. When he had seated himself he talked of ‘majorities’ and showed a disposition to converse on the general subject of the fluctuation of Liberal gains. He had an extraordinary memory for facts of this sort and could mention the figures relating to elections in innumerable places in particular years. To many of these facts he attached great importance, in his simple, kindly, presupposing way; returning five minutes later and correcting himself if he had said that some one, in 1857, had had 6014 instead of 6004.
     Nick always felt a great hypocrite as he listened to him, in spite of the old man’s courtesy – a thing so charming in itself that it would have been grossness to speak of him as a bore. The difficulty was that he took for granted all kinds of positive assent, and Nick, in his company, found himself immersed in an atmosphere of tacit pledges which constituted the very medium of intercourse and yet made him draw his breath a little in pain when, for a moment, he measured them. There would have been no hypocrisy at all if he could have regarded Mr Carteret as a mere sweet spectacle, the last or almost the last illustration of a departing tradition of manners. But he represented something more than manners; he represented what he believed to be morals and ideas – ideas as regards which he took your personal deference (not discovering how natural that was) for participation. Nick liked to think that his father, though ten years younger, had found it congruous to make his best friend of the owner of so nice a nature: it gave a softness to his feeling for that memory to be reminded that Sir Nicholas had been of the same general type – a type so pure, so disinterested, so anxious about the public good. Just so it endeared Mr Carteret to him to perceive that he considered his father had done a definite work, prematurely interrupted, which had been an absolute benefit to the people of England. The oddity was however that though both Mr Carteret’s aspect and his appreciation were still so fresh, this relation of his to his late distinguished friend made the latter appear to Nick even more irrecoverably dead. The good old man had almost a vocabulary of his own, made up of old-fashioned political phrases and quite untainted with the new terms, mostly borrowed from America; indeed, his language and his tone made those of almost any one who might be talking with him appear by contrast rather American. He was, at least nowadays, never severe or denunciatory; but sometimes in telling an anecdote he dropped such an expression as ‘the rascal said to me’, or such an epithet as ‘the vulgar dog’.
     Nick was always struck with the rare simplicity (it came out in his countenance) of one who had lived so long and seen so much of affairs that draw forth the passions and perversities of men. It often made him say to himself that Mr Carteret must have been very remarkable to achieve with his means so many things requiring cleverness. It was as if experience, though coming to him in abundance, had dealt with him with such clean hands as to leave no stain and had never provoked him to any general reflection. He had never proceeded in any ironic way from the particular to the general; certainly he had never made a reflection upon anything so unparliamentary as Life. He would have questioned the taste of such an excrescence, and if he had encountered it on the part of another would have regarded it as a kind of French toy, with the uses of which he was unacquainted. Life, for him, was a purely practical function, not a question of phrasing. It must be added that he had, to Nick’s perception, his variations – his back windows opening into grounds more private. That was visible from the way his eye grew cold and his whole polite face rather austere when he listened to something that he didn’t agree with or perhaps even understand; as if his modesty did not in strictness forbid the suspicion that a thing he didn’t understand would have a probability against it. At such times there was something a little deadly in the silence in which he simply waited, with a lapse in his face, without helping his interlocutor out. Nick would have been very sorry to attempt to communicate to him a matter which he probably would not understand. This cut off of course a multitude of subjects.
     The evening passed exactly as Nick had foreseen, even to the rather early dispersal of the guests, two of whom were ‘local’ men, earnest and distinct, though not particularly distinguished. The third was a young, slim, uninitiated gentleman whom Lord Bottomley brought with him and concerning whom Nick was informed beforehand that he was engaged to be married to the Honourable Jane, his lordship’s second daughter. There were recurrent allusions to Nick’s victory, as to which he had the fear that he might appear to exhibit less interest in it than the company did. He took energetic precautions against this and felt repeatedly a little spent with them, for the subject always came up once more. Yet it was not as his but as theirs that they liked the triumph. Mr Carteret took leave of him for the night directly after the other guests had gone, using at this moment the words that he had often used before –
     “You may sit up to any hour you like. I only ask that you don’t read in bed.”

17

     When he got into the street he looked about him for a cab, but he was obliged to walk some distance before encountering one. In this little interval he saw no reason to modify the determination he had formed in descending the steep staircase of the Hôtel de la Garonne; indeed the desire which prompted it only quickened his pace. He had an hour to spare and he too would go to see Madame Carré. If Miriam and her companion had proceeded to the Rue de Constantinople on foot he would probably reach the house as soon as they. It was all quite logical: he was eager to see Miriam – that was natural enough; and he had admitted to Mrs Rooth that he was keen on the subject of Mrs Lovick’s theatrical brother, in whom such effective aid might perhaps reside. To catch Miriam really revealing herself to the old actress (since that was her errand), with the jump she believed herself to have taken, would be a very happy stroke, the thought of which made her benefactor impatient. He presently found his cab and, as he bounded in, bade the coachman drive fast. He learned from Madame Carré’s portress that her illustrious locataire was at home and that a lady and a gentleman had gone up some time before.
     In the little antechamber, after he was admitted, he heard a high voice issue from the salon, and, stopping a moment to listen, perceived that Miriam was already launched in a recitation. He was able to make out the words, all the more that before he could prevent the movement the maid-servant who had let him in had already opened the door of the room (one of the wings of it, there being, as in most French doors, two pieces), before which, within, a heavy curtain was suspended. Miriam was in the act of rolling out some speech from the English poetic drama –

“For I am sick and capable of fears,
Oppressed with wrongs and therefore full of fears.”

He recognized one of the great tirades of Shakespeare’s Constance and saw she had just begun the magnificent scene at the beginning of the third act of King John, in which the passionate, injured mother and widow sweeps in wild organ-tones up and down the scale of her irony and wrath. The curtain concealed him and he lurked there for three minutes after he had motioned to the femme de chambre to retire on tiptoe. The trio in the salon, absorbed in the performance, had apparently not heard his entrance or the opening of the door, which was covered by the girl’s splendid declamation. Sherringham listened intently, he was so arrested by the spirit with which she attacked her formidable verses. He had needed to hear her utter but half a dozen of them to comprehend the long stride she had taken in his absence; they told him that she had leaped into possession of her means. He remained where he was till she arrived at –

“Then speak again; not all thy former tale,
But this one word, whether thy tale be true.”

This apostrophe, being briefly responded to in another voice, gave him time quickly to raise the curtain and show himself, passing into the room with a “Go on, go on!” and a gesture earnestly deprecating a stop.
     Miriam, in the full swing of her part, paused but for an instant and let herself ring out again, while Peter sank into the nearest chair and she fixed him with her illumined eyes, or rather with those of the raving Constance. Madame Carré, buried in a chair, kissed her hand to him, and a young man who stood near the girl giving her the cue stared at him over the top of a little book. “Admirable – magnificent; go on,” Sherringham repeated – “go on to the end of the scene – do it all!” Miriam flushed a little, but he immediately discovered that she had no personal emotion in seeing him again; the cold passion of art had perched on her banner and she listened to herself with an ear as vigilant as if she had been a Paganini drawing a fiddle-bow. This effect deepened as she went on, rising and rising to the great occasion, moving with extraordinary ease and in the largest, clearest style on the dizzy ridge of her idea. That she had an idea was visible enough and that the whole thing was very different from all that Sherringham had hitherto heard her attempt. It belonged quite to another class of effort; she seemed now like the finished statue lifted from the ground to its pedestal. It was as if the sun of her talent had risen above the hills and she knew that she was moving, that she would always move, in its guiding light. This conviction was the one artless thing that glimmered like a young joy through the tragic mask of Constance, and Sherringham’s heart beat faster as he caught it in her face. It only made her appear more intelligent; and yet there had been a time when he had thought her stupid! Intelligent was the whole spirit in which she carried the scene, making him cry to himself from point to point: “How she feels it – how she sees it – how she creates it!”
     He looked at moments at Madame Carré and perceived that she had an open book in her lap, apparently a French prose version, brought by her visitors, of the play; but she never either glanced at him or at the volume; she only sat screwing into the girl her hard bright eyes, polished by experience like fine old brasses. The young man uttering the lines of the other speakers was attentive in another degree; he followed Miriam in his own copy of the play, to be sure not to miss the cue; but he was elated and expressive, was evidently even surprised; he coloured and smiled, and when he extended his hand to assist Constance to rise, after Miriam, acting out her text, had seated herself grandly on ‘the huge, firm earth’, he bowed over her as obsequiously as if she had been his veritable sovereign. He was a very good-looking young man, tall, well-proportioned, straight-featured and fair, of whom manifestly the first thing to be said on any occasion was that he looked remarkably like a gentleman. He carried this appearance, which proved inveterate and importunate, to a point that was almost a negation of its spirit; that is, it might have been a question whether it could be in good taste to wear any character, even that particular one, so much on one’s sleeve. It was literally on his sleeve that this young man partly wore his own; for it resided considerably in his attire and especially in a certain close-fitting dark blue frock-coat (a miracle of a fit), which moulded his young form just enough and not too much and constituted (as Sherringham was destined to perceive later) his perpetual uniform or badge. It was not till later that Sherringham began to feel exasperated by Basil Dashwood’s ‘type’ (the young stranger was of course Basil Dashwood), and even by his blue frock-coat, the recurrent, unvarying, imperturbable ‘good form’ of his aspect. This unprofessional air ended by striking the observer as the profession that he had adopted, and was indeed (so far as had as yet been indicated) his theatrical capital, his main qualification for the stage.
     The powerful, ample manner in which Miriam handled her scene produced its full impression, the art with which she surmounted its difficulties, the liberality with which she met its great demand upon the voice, and the variety of expression that she threw into a torrent of objurgation. It was a real composition, studded with passages that called a suppressed ‘Brava!’ to the lips and seeming to show that a talent capable of such an exhibition was capable of anything.

“But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune join’d to make thee great:
Of Nature’s gifts thou mayst with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose.”

As Miriam turned to her imagined child with this exquisite apostrophe (she addressed Mr Dashwood as if he were playing Arthur, and he lowered his book, dropped his head and his eyes and looked handsome and ingenuous), she opened at a stroke to Sherringham’s vision a prospect that they would yet see her express tenderness better even than anything else. Her voice was enchanting in these lines, and the beauty of her performance was that while she uttered the full fury of the part she missed none of its poetry.
     “Where did she get hold of that – where did she get hold of that?” Sherringham wondered while his whole sense vibrated. “She hadn’t got hold of it when I went away.” And the assurance flowed over him again that she had found the key to her box of treasures. In the summer, during their weeks of frequent meeting, she had only fumbled with the lock. One October day, while he was away, the key had slipped in, had fitted, or her finger at last had touched the right spring, and the capricious casket had flown open.
     It was during the present solemnity that Sherringham, excited by the way she came out and with a hundred startled ideas about her wheeling through his mind, was for the first time and most vividly visited by a perception that ended by becoming frequent with him – that of the perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion, that any artistic performance requires and that all, whatever the instrument, require in exactly the same degree: the application, in other words, clear and calculated, crystal-firm as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of experience, of suffering, of joy. Sherringham afterwards often talked of this with Miriam, who however was not able to present him with a neat theory of the subject. She had no knowledge that it was publicly discussed; she was just practically on the side of those who hold that at the moment of production the artist cannot have his wits too much about him. When Peter told her there were people who maintained that in such a crisis he must lose himself in the flurry she stared with surprise and then broke out: “Ah, the idiots!” She eventually became in her judgements, in impatience and the expression of contempt, very free and absolutely irreverent.
     “What a splendid scolding!” Sherringham exclaimed when, on the entrance of the Pope’s legate, her companion closed the book upon the scene. Peter pressed his lips to Madame Carré’s finger-tips; the old actress got up and held out her arms to Miriam. The girl never took her eyes off Sherringham while she passed into Madame Carré’s embrace and remained there. They were full of their usual sombre fire, and it was always the case that they expressed too much anything that they expressed at all; but they were not defiant nor even triumphant now – they were only deeply explicative; they seemed to say: “That’s the sort of thing I meant; that’s what I had in mind when I asked you to try to do something for me.” Madame Carré folded her pupil to her bosom, holding her there as the old marquise in a comédie de mœurs might, in the last scene, have held her god-daughter the ingénue.
     “Have you got me an engagement?” Miriam asked of Sherringham. “Yes, he has done something splendid for me,” she went on to Madame Carré resting her hand caressingly on one of the actress’s while the old woman discoursed with Mr Dashwood, who was telling her in very pretty French that he was tremendously excited about Miss Rooth. Madame Carré looked at him as if she wondered how he appeared when he was calm and how, as a dramatic artist, he expressed that condition.
     “Yes, yes, something splendid, for a beginning,” Sherringham answered, radiantly, recklessly; feeling now only that he would say anything, do anything, to please her. He spent on the spot, in imagination, his last penny.
     “It’s such a pity you couldn’t follow it; you would have liked it so much better,” Mr Dashwood observed to his hostess.
     “Couldn’t follow it? Do you take me for une sotte?” the celebrated artist cried. “I suspect I followed it de plus près que vous, monsieur!”
     “Ah, you see the language is so awfully fine,” Basil Dashwood replied, looking at his shoes.
     “The language? Why, she rails like a fish-wife. Is that what you call language? Ours is another business.”
     “If you understood – if you understood you would see the greatness of it,” Miriam declared. And then, in another tone: “Such delicious expressions!”
     “On dit que c’est très-fort. But who can tell if you really say it?” Madame Carré demanded.
     “Ah, par exemple, I can!” Sherringham exclaimed.
     “Oh, you – you’re a Frenchman.”
     “Couldn’t he tell if he were not?” asked Basil Dashwood.
     The old woman shrugged her shoulders. “He wouldn’t know.”
     “That’s flattering to me.”
     “Oh, you – don’t you pretend to complain,” Madame Carré said. “I prefer our imprecations – those of Camille,” she went on. “They have the beauty des plus belles choses.”
     “I can say them too,” Miriam broke in.
     “Insolente!” smiled Madame Carré “Camille doesn’t squat down on the floor in the middle of them.”

“For grief is proud and makes his owner stoop.
To me and to the state of my great grief
Let kings assemble,”

Miriam quickly declaimed. “Ah, if you don’t feel the way she makes a throne of it!”
     “It’s really tremendously fine, chère madame,” Sherringham said. “There’s nothing like it.”
     “Vous êtes insupportables,” the old woman answered. “Stay with us. I’ll teach you Phèdre.”
     “Ah, Phædra – Phædra!” Basil Dashwood vaguely ejaculated, looking more gentlemanly than ever.
     “You have learned all I have taught you, but where the devil have you learned what I haven’t taught you?” Madame Carré went on.
     “I’ve worked – I have; you’d call it work – all through the bright, late summer, all through the hot, dull, empty days. I’ve battered down the door – I did hear it crash one day. But I’m not so very good yet: I’m only in the right direction.”
     “Malicieuse!” murmured Madame Carré.
     “Oh, I can beat that,” the girl went on.
     “Didn’t you wake up one morning and find you had grown a pair of wings?” Sherringham asked. “Because that’s what the difference amounts to – you really soar. Moreover you’re an angel,” he added, charmed with her unexpectedness, the good-nature of her forbearance to reproach him for not having written to her. And it seemed to him privately that she was angelic when in answer to this she said ever so blandly:
     “You know you read King John with me before you went away. I thought over constantly what you said. I didn’t understand it much at the time – I was so stupid. But it all came to me later.”
     “I wish you could see yourself,” Sherringham answered.
     “My dear fellow, I do. What do you take me for? I didn’t miss a vibration of my voice, a fold of my robe.”
     “I didn’t see you looking,” Sherringham returned.
     “No one ever will. Do you think I would show it?”
     “Ars celare artem,” Basil Dashwood jocosely dropped.
     “You must first have the art to hide,” said Sherringham, wondering a little why Miriam didn’t introduce her young friend to him. She was, however, both then and later, perfectly neglectful of such cares, never thinking or heeding how other people got on together. When she found they didn’t get on she laughed at them: that was the nearest she came to arranging for them. Sherringham observed, from the moment she felt her strength, the immense increase of her good-humoured inattention to detail – all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to sacrifice holocausts of feelings when the feelings were other people’s. This conferred on her a kind of profanity, an absence of ceremony in her social relations, which was both amusing, because it suggested that she would take what she gave, and formidable, because it was inconvenient and you might not care to give what she would take.
     “If you haven’t got any art it’s not quite the same as if you didn’t hide it, is it?” asked Basil Dashwood.
     “That’s right – say one of your clever things!” murmured Miriam, sweetly, to the young man.
     “You’re always acting,” he answered, in English, with a laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what he himself had felt weeks before.
     “And when you have shown them your fish-wife, to your public de là-bas, what will you do next?” asked Madame Carré.
     “I’ll do Juliet – I’ll do Cleopatra.”
     “Rather a big bill, isn’t it?” Mr Dashwood volunteered to Sherringham, in a friendly, discriminating manner.
     “Constance and Juliet – take care you don’t mix them,” said Sherringham.
     “I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters,” Miriam replied.
     “Ah, vous-en-êtes là?” cried the old actress. “You may have a hundred characters, but you have only three plays. I’m told that’s all there are in English.”
     Miriam appealed to Sherringham. “What arrangements have you made? What do the people want?”
     “The people at the theatre?”
     “I’m afraid they don’t want King John, and I don’t believe they hunger for Antony and Cleopatra,” Basil Dashwood suggested. “Ships and sieges and armies and pyramids, you know: we mustn’t be too heavy.”
     “Oh, I hate scenery!” sighed Miriam.
     “Elle est superbe,” said Madame Carré. “You must put those pieces on the stage: how will you do it?”
     “Oh, we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carré,” Basil Dashwood responded, genially. “They put money on it, you know.”
     “On it? But what do they put in it? Who will interpret them? Who will manage a style like that – the style of which the verses she just repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?”
     “Oh, you’ll hear of a good deal when once she gets started,” Basil Dashwood contended, cheerfully.
     Madame Carré looked at him a moment; then, “You’ll become very bad,” she said to Miriam. “I’m glad I sha’n’t see it.”
     “People will do things for me – I’ll make them,” the girl declared. “I’ll stir them up so that they’ll have ideas.”
     “What people, pray?”
     “Ah, terrible woman!” Sherringham moaned, theatrically.
     “We translate your pieces – there will be plenty of parts,” Basil Dashwood said.
     “Why then go out of the door to come in at the window? – especially if you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman with her back turned.”
     “Do you really want to keep her?” Sherringham asked of Madame Carré, as if he were thinking for a moment that this after all might be possible.
     She bent her strange eyes on him. “No, you are all too queer together; we couldn’t be bothered with you, and you’re not worth it.”
     “I’m glad it’s together; we can console each other.”
     “If you only would; but you don’t seem to! In short, I don’t understand you – I give you up. But it doesn’t matter,” said the old woman, wearily, “for the theatre is dead and even you, ma toute-belle, won’t bring it to life. Everything is going from bad to worse, and I don’t care what becomes of you. You wouldn’t understand us here and they won’t understand you there, and everything is impossible, and no one is a whit the wiser, and it’s not of the least consequence. Only when you raise your arms lift them just a little higher,” Madame Carré added.
     “My mother will be happier chez nous,” said Miriam, throwing her arms straight up with a noble tragic movement.
     “You won’t be in the least in the right path till your mother’s in despair.”
     “Well, perhaps we can bring that about even in London,” Sherringham suggested, laughing.
     “Dear Mrs Rooth – she’s great fun,” Mr Dashwood dropped.
     Miriam transferred the gloomy beauty of her gaze to him, as if she were practising. “You won’t upset her, at any rate.” Then she stood with her fatal mask before Madame Carré. “I want to do the modern too. I want to do le drame, with realistic effects.”
     “And do you want to look like the portico of the Madeleine when it’s draped for a funeral?” her instructress mocked. “Never, never. I don’t believe you’re various: that’s not the way I see you. You’re pure tragedy, with de grands effets de voix, in the great style, or you’re nothing.”
     “Be beautiful – be only that,” Sherringham advised. “Be only what you can be so well – something that one may turn to for a glimpse of perfection, to lift one out of all the vulgarities of the day.”
     Thus apostrophized, the girl broke out with one of the speeches of Racine’s Phædra, hushing her companions on the instant. “You’ll be the English Rachel,” said Basil Dashwood when she stopped.
     “Acting in French!” Madame Carré exclaimed. “I don’t believe in an English Rachel.”
     “I shall have to work it out, what I shall be,” Miriam responded with a rich, pensive effect.
     “You’re in wonderfully good form to-day,” Sherringham said to her; his appreciation revealing a personal subjection which he was unable to conceal from his companions, much as he wished it.
     “I really mean to do everything.”
     “Very well; after all, Garrick did.”
     “Well, I shall be the Garrick of my sex.”
     “There’s a very clever author doing something for me; I should like you to see it,” said Basil Dashwood, addressing himself equally to Miriam and to her diplomatic friend.
     “Ah, if you have very clever authors!” Madame Carré spun the sound to the finest satiric thread.
     “I shall be very happy to see it,” said Sherringham.
     This response was so benevolent that Basil Dashwood presently began: “May I ask you at what theatre you have made arrangements?”
     Sherringham looked at him a moment. “Come and see me at the Embassy and I’ll tell you.” Then he added: “I know your sister, Mrs Lovick.”
     “So I supposed: that’s why I took the liberty of asking such a question.”
     “It’s no liberty; but Mr Sherringham doesn’t appear to be able to tell you,” said Miriam.
     “Well, you know it’s a very curious world, all those theatrical people over there,” Sherringham said.
     “Ah, don’t say anything against them, when I’m one of them,” Basil Dashwood laughed.
     “I might plead the absence of information, as Miss Rooth has neglected to make us acquainted.”
     Miriam smiled: “I know you both so little.” But she presented them, with a great stately air, to each other, and the two men shook hands while Madame Carré observed them.
     “Tiens! you gentlemen meet here for the first time? You do right to become friends – that’s the best thing. Live together in peace and mutual confidence. C’est de beaucoup le plus sage.”
     “Certainly, for yoke-fellows,” said Sherringham.
     He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off, waving the talk away with charming overdone stage-horror and the young hands of the heroines of Marivaux. “Ah, wait till you go, for that! Do you suppose I care for news of your mountebanks’ booths?”

     Whether Sherringham had prearranged it is more than I can say, but Mademoiselle Voisin delayed so long to show herself that Mrs Rooth, who wished to see the rest of the play, though she had sat it out on another occasion, expressed a returning relish for her corner of the baignoire and gave her conductor the best pretext he could have desired for asking Basil Dashwood to be so good as to escort her back. When the young actor, of whose personal preference Sherringham was quite aware, had led Mrs Rooth away with an absence of moroseness which showed that his striking analogy with a gentleman was not kept for the footlights, the two others sat on a divan in the part of the room furthest from the entrance, so that it gave them a degree of privacy, and Miriam watched the coming and going of their fellow-visitors and the indefinite people, attached to the theatre, hanging about, while her companion gave a name to some of the figures, Parisian celebrities.
     “Fancy poor Dashwood, cooped up there with mamma!” the girl exclaimed, whimsically.
     “You’re awfully cruel to him; but that’s of course,” said Sherringham.
     “It seems to me I’m as kind as you: you sent him off.”
     “That was for your mother: she was tired.”
     “Oh, gammon! And why, if I were cruel, should it be of course?”
     “Because you must destroy and torment and consume – that’s your nature. But you can’t help your type, can you?”
     “My type?” the girl repeated.
     “It’s bad, perverse, dangerous. It’s essentially insolent.”
     “And pray what is yours, when you talk like that? Would you say such things if you didn’t know the depths of my good-nature?”
     “Your good-nature all comes back to that,” said Sherringham. “It’s an abyss of ruin – for others. You have no respect. I’m speaking of the artistic character, in the direction and in the plenitude in which you have it. It’s unscrupulous, nervous, capricious, wanton.”
     “I don’t know about respect: one can be good,” Miriam reasoned.
     “It doesn’t matter, so long as one is powerful,” answered Sherringham. “We can’t have everything, and surely we ought to understand that we must pay for things. A splendid organization for a special end, like yours, is so rare and rich and fine that we oughtn’t to grudge it its conditions.”
     “What do you call its conditions?” Miriam demanded, turning and looking at him.
     “Oh, the need to take its ease, to take up space, to make itself at home in the world, to square its elbows and knock others about. That’s large and free; it’s the good-nature you speak of. You must forage and ravage and leave a track behind you; you must live upon the country you occupy. And you give such delight that, after all, you are welcome – you are infinitely welcome!”
     “I don’t know what you mean. I only care for the idea,” Miriam said.
     “That’s exactly what I pretend; and we must all help you to it. You use us, you push us about, you break us up. We are your tables and chairs, the simple furniture of your life.”
     “Whom do you mean by ‘we’?”
     Sherringham gave a laugh. “Oh, don’t be afraid – there will be plenty of others.”
     Miriam made no rejoinder to this, but after a moment she broke out again: “Poor Dashwood, immured with mamma – he’s like a lame chair that one has put into the corner.”
     “Don’t break him up before he has served. I really believe that something will come out of him,” her companion went on. “However, you’ll break me up first,” he added, “and him probably never at all.”
     “And why shall I honour you so much more?”
     “Because I’m a better article, and you’ll feel that.”
     “You have the superiority of modesty – I see.”
     “I’m better than a young mountebank – I’ve vanity enough to say that.”
     She turned upon him with a flush in her cheek and a splendid dramatic face. “How you hate us! Yes, at bottom, below your little taste, you hate us!” she repeated.
     He coloured too, met her eyes, looked into them a minute, seemed to accept the imputation, and then said quickly: “Give it up; come away with me.”
     “Come away with you?”
     “Leave this place: give it up.”
     “You brought me here, you insisted it should be only you, and now you must stay,” she declared, with a head-shake and a laugh. “You should know what you want, dear Mr Sherringham.”
     “I do – I know now. Come away, before she comes.”
     “Before she comes?”
     “She’s success – this wonderful Voisin – she’s triumph, she’s full accomplishment: the hard, brilliant realization of what I want to avert for you.” Miriam looked at him in silence, the angry light still in her face, and he repeated: “Give it up – give it up.
     Her eyes softened after a moment; she smiled and then she said: “Yes, you’re better than poor Dashwood.”
     “Give it up and we’ll live for ourselves, in ourselves, in something that can have a sanctity.”
     “All the same, you do hate us,” the girl went on.
     “I don’t want to be conceited, but I mean that I’m sufficiently fine and complicated to tempt you. I’m an expensive modern watch, with a wonderful escapement – therefore you’ll smash me if you can.”
     “Never – never!” said the girl, getting up. “You tell me the hour too well.” She quitted her companion and stood looking at Gérôme’s fine portrait of the pale Rachel, invested with the antique attributes of tragedy. The rise of the curtain had drawn away most of the company. Sherringham, from his bench, watched Miriam a little, turning his eye from her to the vivid image of the dead actress and thinking that his companion suffered little by the juxtaposition. Presently he came over and joined her again, and she said to him: “I wonder if that is what your cousin had in his mind.”
     “My cousin?”
     “What was his name? Mr Dormer; that first day at Madame Carré’s. He offered to paint my portrait.”
     “I remember. I put him up to it.”
     “Was he thinking of this?”
     “I don’t think he has ever seen it. I dare say I was.”
     “Well, when we go to London he must do it,” said Miriam.
     “Oh, there’s no hurry,” Sherringham replied.
     “Don’t you want my picture?” asked the girl, with one of her successful touches.
     “I’m not sure I want it from you. I don’t know quite what he’d make of you.”
     “He looked so clever – I liked him. I saw him again at your party.”
     “He’s a dear fellow; but what is one to say of a painter who goes for his inspiration to the House of Commons?”
     “To the House of Commons?”
     “He has lately got himself elected.”
     “Dear me, what a pity! I wanted to sit for him; but perhaps he won’t have me, as I’m not a member of Parliament.”
     “It’s my sister, rather, who has got him in.”
     “Your sister who was at your house that day? What has she to do with it?”
     “Why, she’s his cousin, just as I am. And in addition,” Sherringham went on, “she’s to be married to him.”
     “Married – really? So he paints her, I suppose?”
     “Not much, probably. His talent in that line isn’t what she esteems in him most.”
     “It isn’t great, then?”
     “I haven’t the least idea.”
     “And in the political line?”
     “I scarcely can tell. He’s very clever.”
     “He does paint then?”
     “I dare say.”
     Miriam looked at Gérôme’s picture again. “Fancy his going into the House of Commons! I And your sister put him there?”
     “She worked, she canvassed.”
     “Ah, you’re a queer family!” the girl exclaimed, turning round at the sound of a step.
     “We’re lost – here’s Mademoiselle Voisin,” said Sherringham.
     This celebrity presented herself smiling and addressing Miriam. “I acted for you to-night – I did my best.”
     “What a pleasure to speak to you, to thank you!” the girl murmured, admiringly. She was startled and dazzled.
     “I couldn’t come to you before, but now I’ve got a rest – for half an hour,” the actress went on. Gracious and passive, as if she were a little tired, she let Sherringham, without looking at him, take her hand and raise it to his lips. “I’m sorry I make you lose the others – they are so good in this act,” she added.
     “We have seen them before, and there’s nothing so good as you,” Miriam replied.
     “I like my part,” said Mademoiselle Voisin, gently, smiling still at our young lady with clear, charming eyes. “One is always better in that case.”
     “She’s so bad sometimes. you know!” Sherringham jested, to Miriam; leading the actress to glance at him kindly and vaguely, with a little silence which, with her, you could not call embarrassment, but which was still less affectation.
     “And it’s so interesting to be here – so interesting!” Miriam declared.
     “Ah, you like our old house? Yes, we are very proud of it.” And Mademoiselle Voisin smiled again at Sherringham, good-humouredly, as if to say: “Well, here I am, and what do you want of me? Don’t ask me to invent it myself, but if you’ll tell me I’ll do it.” Miriam admired the note of discreet interrogation in her voice – the slight suggestion of surprise at their ‘old house’ being liked. The actress was already an astonishment to her, from her seeming still more perfect on a nearer view; which was not, she had an idea, what actresses usually did. This was very encouraging to her: it widened the programme of a young lady about to embrace the scenic career. To have so much to show before the footlights and yet to have so much left when you came off – that was really wonderful. Mademoiselle Voisin’s eyes, as one looked into them, were still more agreeable than the distant spectator would have supposed; and there was in her appearance an extreme finish which instantly suggested to Miriam that she herself, in comparison, was big and rough and coarse.
     “You’re lovely to-night – you’re particularly lovely,” said Sherringham, very frankly, translating Miriam’s own impression and at the same time giving her an illustration of the way that, in Paris at least, gentlemen expressed themselves to the stars of the drama. She thought she knew her companion very well and had been witness of the degree to which, under these circumstances, his familiarity could increase; but his address to the slim, distinguished, harmonious woman before them had a different quality, the note of a special usage. If Miriam had had any apprehension that such directness might be taken as excessive, it was removed by the manner in which Mademoiselle Voisin returned –
     “Oh, one is always well enough when one is made up; one is always exactly the same.” That served as an example of the good taste with which a star of the drama could receive homage that was wanting in originality. Miriam determined on the spot that this should be the way she would receive it. The grace of her new acquaintance was the greater as the becoming bloom which she alluded to as artificial was the result of a science so consummate that it had none of the grossness of a mask. The perception of all this was exciting to our young aspirant, and her excitement relieved itself in the inquiry, which struck her as rude as soon as she had uttered it –
     “You acted for me? How did you know? What am I to you?”
     “Monsieur Sherringham has told me about you. He says we are nothing beside you; that you are to be the great star of the future. I’m proud that you’ve seen me.”
     “That of course is what I tell every one,” Sherringham said, a trifle awkwardly, to Miriam.
     “I can believe it when I see you. Je vous ai bien observée,” the actress continued, in her sweet, conciliatory tone.
     Miriam looked from one of her interlocutors to the other, as if there was a joy to her in this report of Sherringham’s remarks, accompanied however, and partly mitigated, by a quicker vision of what might have passed between a secretary of embassy and a creature so exquisite as Mademoiselle Voisin. “Ah, you’re wonderful people – a most interesting impression!” she sighed.
     “I was looking for you; he had prepared me. We are such old friends!” said the actress, in a tone courteously exempt from intention: upon which Sherringham again took her hand and raised it to his lips, with a tenderness which her whole appearance seemed to bespeak for her, a sort of practical consideration and carefulness of touch, as if she were an object precious and frail, an instrument for producing rare sounds, to be handled, like a legendary violin, with a recognition of its value.
     “Your dressing-room is so pretty – show her your dressing-room,” said Sherringham.
     “Willingly, if she’ll come up. Vous savez, c’est une montée.”
     “It’s a shame to inflict it on you,” Miriam objected.
     “Comment donc? If it will interest you in the least!” They exchanged civilities, almost caresses, trying which could have the nicest manner to the other. It was the actress’s manner that struck Miriam most; it denoted such a training, so much taste, expressed such a ripe conception of urbanity.
     “No wonder she acts well when she has that tact – feels, perceives, is so remarkable, mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” Miriam said to herself as they followed their conductress into another corridor and up a wide, plain staircase. The staircase was spacious and long, and this part of the establishment was sombre and still, with the gravity of a college or a convent. They reached another passage, lined with little doors, on each of which the name of a comedian was painted; and here the aspect became still more monastic, like that of a row of solitary cells. Mademoiselle Voisin led the way to her own door, obligingly, as if she wished to be hospitable, dropping little subdued, friendly attempts at explanation on the way. At her threshold the monasticism stopped. Miriam found herself in a wonderfully upholstered nook, a nest of lamplight and delicate cretonne. Save for its pair of long glasses it looked like a tiny boudoir, with a water-colour drawing of value in each panel of stretched stuff, its crackling fire, its charming order. It was intensely bright and extremely hot, singularly pretty and exempt from litter. Nothing was lying about, but a small draped doorway led into an inner sanctuary. To Miriam it seemed royal; it immediately made the art of the comedian the most distinguished thing in the world. It was just such a place as they should have, in the intervals, if they were expected to be great artists. It was a result of the same evolution as Mademoiselle Voisin herself – not that our young lady found this particular term to her hand, to express her idea. But her mind was flooded with an impression of style, of refinement, of the long continuity of a tradition. The actress said, “Voilà, c’est tout!” as if it were little enough and there were even something clumsy in her having brought them so far for nothing and in their all sitting there waiting and looking at each other till it was time for her to change her dress. But to Miriam it was occupation enough to note what she did and said: these things and her whole person and carriage struck her as exquisite in their adaptation to the particular occasion. She had had an idea that foreign actresses were rather of the cabotin order; but her hostess suggested to her much more a princess than a cabotine. She would do things as she liked, and straight off : Miriam couldn’t fancy her in the gropings and humiliations of rehearsal. Everything in her had been sifted and formed, her tone was perfect, her amiability complete, and she might have been the charming young wife of a secretary of state receiving a pair of strangers of distinction. Miriam observed all her movements. And then, as Sherringham had said, she was particularly lovely.
     Suddenly she told Sherringham that she must put him à la porte – she wanted to change her dress. He retired and returned to the foyer, where Miriam was to rejoin him after remaining the few minutes more with Mademoiselle Voisin and coming down with her. He waited for his companion, walking up and down and making up his mind, and when she presently came in he said to her:
     “Please don’t go back for the rest of the play. Stay here.” They now had the foyer virtually to themselves.
     “I want to stay here. I like it better.” She moved back to the chimney-piece, from above which the cold portrait of Rachel looked down, and as he accompanied her he said:
     “I meant what I said just now.”
     “What you said to Voisin?”
     “No, no; to you. Give it up and live with me.”
     “Give it up?” And she turned her stage face upon him.
     “Give it up and I’ll marry you to-morrow.”
     “This is a happy time to ask it!” she mocked. “And this is a good place.”
     “Very good indeed, and that’s why I speak: it’s a place to make one choose – it puts all before one.”
     “To make you choose, you mean. I’m much obliged, but that’s not my choice,” laughed Miriam.
     “You shall be anything you like – except this.”
     “Except what I most want to be? I am much obliged.”
     “Don’t you care for me? Haven’t you any gratitude?” Sherringham asked.
     “Gratitude for kindly removing the blessed cup from my lips? I want to be what she is – I want it more than ever.”
     “Ah, what she is!” he replied impatiently.
     “Do you mean I can’t? We’ll see if I can’t. Tell me more about her – tell me everything.”
     “Haven’t you seen for yourself, and can’t you judge?”
     “She’s strange, she’s mysterious,” Miriam declared, looking at the fire. “She showed us nothing – nothing of her real self.”
     “So much the better, all things considered.”
     “Are there all sorts of other things in her life? That’s what I believe.” Miriam went on, raising her eyes to him.
     “I can’t tell you what there is in the life of such a woman.”
     “Imagine – when she’s so perfect!” the girl exclaimed, thoughtfully. “Ah, she kept me off – she kept me off! Her charming manner is in itself a kind of contempt. It’s an abyss – it’s the wall of China. She has a hard polish, an inimitable surface, like some wonderful porcelain that costs more than you’d think.”
     “Do you want to become like that?” Sherringham asked.
     “If I could I should be enchanted. One can always try.”
     “You must act better than she,” said Sherringham.
     “Better? I thought you wanted me to give it up.”
     “Ah, I don’t know what I want and you torment me and turn me inside out! What I want is you yourself.”
     “Oh, don’t worry,” said Miriam, kindly. Then she added that Mademoiselle Voisin had asked her to come to see her; to which Sherringham replied, with a certain dryness, that she would probably not find that necessary. This made Miriam stare, and she asked, “Do you mean it won’t do, on account of mamma’s prejudices?”
     “Say, this time, on account of mine.”
     “Do you mean because she has lovers?”
     “Her lovers are none of our business.”
     “None of mine, I see. So you have been one of them?”
     “No such luck.”
     “What a pity! I should have liked to see that. One must see everything, to be able to do everything.” And as he inquired what she had wished to see she replied: “The way a woman like that receives one of the old ones.”
     Sherringham gave a groan at this, which was at the same time partly a laugh, and, turning away and dropping upon a bench, ejaculated: “You’ll do – you’ll do!”
     He sat there some minutes with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Miriam remained looking at the portrait of Rachel; after which she demanded: “Doesn’t such a woman as that receive – receive every one?”
     “Every one who goes to see her, no doubt.”
     “And who goes?”
     “Lots of men – clever men, eminent men.”
     “Ah, what a charming life! Then doesn’t she go out?”
     “Not what we Philistines mean by that – not into society, never. She never enters a lady’s drawing-room.”
     “How strange, when one’s as distinguished as that; except that she must escape a lot of stupidities and corvées. Then where does she learn such manners?”
     “She teaches manners, à ses heures: she doesn’t need to learn them.”
     “Oh, she has given me ideas! But in London actresses go into society,” Miriam continued.
     “Oh, in London nous mêlons les genres!”
     “And sha’n’t I go – I mean if I want?”
     “You’ll have every facility to bore yourself. Don’t doubt of it.”
     “And doesn’t she feel excluded?” Miriam asked.
     “Excluded from what? She has the fullest life.”
     “The fullest?”
     “An intense artistic life. The cleverest men in Paris talk over her work with her; the principal authors of plays discuss with her subjects and characters and questions of treatment. She lives in the world of art.”
     “Ah, the world of art – how I envy her! And you offer me Dashwood!”
     Sherringham rose in his emotion. “I offer you—?”
     Miriam burst out laughing. “You look so droll! You offer me yourself then, instead of all these things.”
     “My child, I also am a very clever man,” he said, smiling, though conscious that for a moment he had stood gaping.
     “You are – you are; I delight in you. No ladies at all – no femmes comme il faut?” Miriam began again.
     “Ah, what do they matter? Your business is the artistic life!” he broke out with inconsequence and with a little irritation at hearing her sound that trivial note again.
     “You’re a dear – your charming good sense comes back to you! What do you want of me then?”
     “I want you for myself – not for others; and now, in time, before anything’s done.”
     “Why then did you bring me here? Everything’s done; I feel it to-night.”
     “I know the way you should look at it – if you do look at it at all,” Sherringham conceded.
     “That’s so easy! I thought you liked the stage so,” Miriam said, artfully.
     “Don’t you want me to be a great swell?”
     “And don’t you want me to be?”
     “You will be – you’ll share my glory.”
     “So will you share mine.”
     “The husband of an actress? Yes, I see that!” Sherringham cried, with a frank ring of disgust.
     “It’s a silly position, no doubt. But if you’re too good for it why talk about it? Don’t you think I’m important?” Miriam inquired. Her companion stood looking at her, and she suddenly said in a different tone: “Ah, why should we quarrel, when you have been so kind, so generous? Can’t we always be friends – the solidest friends?”
     Her voice sank to the sweetest cadence and her eyes were grateful and good as they rested on him. She sometimes said things with such perfection that they seemed dishonest, but in this case Sherringham was stirred to an expressive response. Just as he was making it, however, he was moved to utter other words – “Take care, here’s Dashwood!” Mrs Rooth’s companion was in the doorway. He had come back to say that they really must relieve him.

     Mrs Dallow came up to London soon after the meeting of Parliament; she made no secret of the fact that she was fond of the place, and naturally in present conditions it would not have become less attractive to her. But she prepared to withdraw from it again for the Easter vacation, not to return to Harsh, but to pay a couple of country visits. She did not however leave town with the crowd – she never did anything with the crowd – but waited till the Monday after Parliament rose; facing with composure, in Great Stanhope Street, the horrors, as she had been taught to consider them, of a Sunday out of the session. She had done what she could to mitigate them by asking a handful of ‘stray men’ to dine with her that evening. Several members of this disconsolate class sought comfort in Great Stanhope Street in the afternoon, and them for the most part she also invited to come back at eight o’clock. There were therefore almost too many people at dinner – there were even a couple of wives. Nick Dormer came to dinner, but he was not present in the afternoon. Each of the persons who were had said on coming in: “So you’ve not gone – I’m awfully glad.” Mrs Dallow had replied, “No, I’ve not gone,” but she had in no case added that she was glad, nor had she offered an explanation. She never offered explanations: she always assumed that no one could invent them so well as those who had the florid taste to desire them.
     And in this case she was right, for it is probable that few of her visitors failed to say to themselves that her not having gone would have had something to do with Dormer. That could pass for an explanation with many of Mrs Dallow’s visitors, who as a general thing were not morbidly analytic; especially with those who met Nick as a matter of course at the dinner. His being present at this lady’s entertainments, being in her house whenever, as the phrase was, a candle was lighted, was taken as a sign that there was something rather particular between them. Nick had said to her more than once that people would wonder why they didn’t marry; but he was wrong in this, inasmuch as there were many of their friends to whom it would not have occurred that his position could be improved by it. That they were cousins was a fact not so evident to others as to themselves, in consequence of which they appeared remarkably intimate. The person seeing clearest in the matter was Mrs Gresham, who lived so much in the world that being alone had become her idea of true sociability. She knew very well that if she had been privately engaged to a young man as amiable as Nick Dormer she would have managed that publicity should not play such a part in their intercourse; and she had her secret scorn for the stupidity of people whose conception of Nick’s relation to Julia Dallow rested on the fact that he was always included in her parties. “If he never was there they might talk,” she said to herself. But Mrs Gresham was supersubtle. To her it would have appeared natural that Julia should celebrate the parliamentary recess by going down to Harsh and securing Nick’s company there for a fortnight; she recognized Mrs Dallow’s actual plans as a comparatively poor substitute – the project of spending the holidays in other people’s houses, to which Nick had also promised to come. Mrs Gresham was romantic; she wondered what was the good of mere snippets and snatches, the chances that any one might have, when large, still days à deux were open to you – chances of which half the sanctity was in what they excluded. However, there were more unsettled matters between Mrs Dallow and her queer kinsman than even Mrs Gresham’s fine insight could embrace. She was not present on the Sunday before Easter at the dinner in Great Stanhope Street; but if she had been Julia’s singular indifference to observation would have stopped short of encouraging her to remain in the drawing-room with Nick after the others had gone. I may add that Mrs Gresham’s extreme curiosity would have emboldened her as little to do so. She would have taken for granted that the pair wished to be alone together, though she would have regarded this only as a snippet.
     The guests stayed late and it was nearly twelve o’clock when Nick, standing before the fire in the room they had quitted, broke out to his companion:
     “See here, Julia, how long do you really expect me to endure this kind of thing?” Mrs Dallow made him no answer; she only leaned back in her chair with her eyes upon his. He met her gaze for a moment; then he turned round to the fire and for another moment looked into it. After this he faced Mrs Dallow again with the exclamation: “It’s so foolish – it’s so damnably foolish!”
     She still said nothing, but at the end of a minute she spoke without answering him. “I shall expect you on Tuesday, and I hope you’ll come by a decent train.”
     “What do you mean by a decent train?”
     “I mean I hope you’ll not leave it till the last thing before dinner, so that we can have a little walk or something.”
     “What’s a little walk or something? Why, if you make such a point of my coming to Griffin, do you want me to come at all?”
     Mrs Dallow hesitated an instant; then she exclaimed: “I knew you hated it!”
     “You provoke me so,” said Nick. “You try to, I think.”
     “And Severals still worse. You’ll get out of that if you can,” Mrs Dallow went on.
     “If I can? What’s to prevent me?”
     “You promised Lady Whiteroy. But of course that’s nothing.”
     “I don’t care a straw for Lady Whiteroy.”
     “And you promised me. But that’s less still.”
     “It is foolish – it’s quite idiotic,” said Nick, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ceiling.
     There was another silence, at the end of which Mrs Dallow remarked: “You might have answered Mr Macgeorge when he spoke to you.”
     “Mr Macgeorge – what has he to do with it?”
     “He has to do with your getting on a little. If you think that’s the way!”
     Nick broke into a laugh. “I like lessons in getting on – in other words I suppose you mean in urbanity – from you, Julia!”
     “Why not from me?”
     “Because you can do nothing base. You’re incapable of putting on a flattering manner, to get something by it: therefore why should you expect me to? You’re unflattering – that is you’re austere – in proportion as there may be something to be got.”
     Mrs Dallow sprang up from her chair, coming towards him. “There is only one thing I want in the world – you know very well.”
     “Yes, you want it so much that you won’t even take it when it’s pressed upon you. How long do you seriously expect me to bear it?” Nick repeated.
     “I never asked you to do anything base,” she said, standing in front of him. “If I’m not clever about throwing myself into things, it’s all the more reason you should be.”
     “If you’re not clever, my dear Julia?” Nick, standing close to her, placed his hands on her shoulders and shook her a little with a mixture of tenderness and passion. “You’re clever enough to make me furious, sometimes!”
     She opened and closed her fan, looking down at it while she submitted to this attenuated violence. “All I want is that when a man like Mr Macgeorge talks to you, you shouldn’t appear to be bored to death. You used to be so charming in that sort of way. And now you appear to take no interest in anything. At dinner to-night you scarcely opened your lips; you treated them all as if you only wished they’d go.”
     “I did wish they’d go. Haven’t I told you a hundred times what I think of your salon?”
     “How then do you want me to live?” Mrs Dallow asked. “Am I not to have a creature in the house?”
     “As many creatures as you like. Your freedom is complete, and as far as I am concerned always will be. Only when you challenge me and overhaul me – not justly I think – I must confess the simple truth, that there are many of your friends I don’t delight in.”
     “Oh, your idea of pleasant people!” Julia exclaimed. “I should like once for all to know what it really is.”
     “I can tell you what it really isn’t: it isn’t Mr Macgeorge. He’s a being almost grotesquely limited.”
     “He’ll be where you’ll never be – unless you change.”
     “To be where Mr Macgeorge is not would be very much my desire. Therefore why should I change?” Nick demanded. “However, I hadn’t the least intention of being rude to him, and I don’t think I was,” he went on. “To the best of my ability I assume a virtue if I have it not; but apparently I’m not enough of a comedian.”
     “If you have it not? It’s when you say things like that that you’re so dreadfully tiresome. As if there were anything that you haven’t or mightn’t have!”
     Nick turned away from his hostess; he took a few impatient steps in the room, looking at the carpet, with his hands in his pockets again. Then he came back to the fire with the observation: “It’s rather hard to be found wanting when one has tried to play one’s part so beautifully.” He paused, with his eyes on Mrs Dallow’s; then continued, with a vibration in his voice: “I’ve imperilled my immortal soul, or at least I’ve bemuddled my intelligence, by all the things I don’t care for that I’ve tried to do, and all the things I detest that I’ve tried to be, and all the things I never can be that I’ve tried to look as if I were – all the appearances and imitations, the pretences and hypocrisies in which I’ve steeped myself to the eyes; and at the end of it (it serves me right!) my reward is simply to learn that I’m still not half humbug enough!”
     Mrs Dallow looked away from him as soon as he had spoken these words; she attached her eyes to the clock which stood behind him and observed irrelevantly:
     “I’m very sorry, but I think you had better go. I don’t like you to stay after midnight.”
     “Ah, what you like and what you don’t like, and where one begins and the other ends – all that’s an impenetrable mystery!” the young man declared. But he took no further notice of her allusion to his departure, adding in a different tone: “‘A man like Mr Macgeorge!’ When you say a thing of that sort, in a certain particular way, I should rather like to suffer you to perish.”
     Mrs Dallow stared; it might have seemed for an instant that she was trying to look stupid. “How can I help it if a few years hence he is certain to be at the head of any Liberal government?”
     “We can’t help it, of course, but we can help talking about it,” Nick smiled. “If we don’t mention it, it may not be noticed.”
     “You’re trying to make me angry. You’re in one of your vicious moods,” observed Mrs Dallow, blowing out, on the chimney-piece, a guttering candle.
     “That I’m exasperated I have already had the honour very positively to inform you. All the same I maintain that I was irreproachable at dinner. I don’t want you to think I shall always be so good as that.”
     “You looked so out of it; you were as gloomy as if every earthly hope had left you, and you didn’t make a single contribution to any discussion that took place. Don’t you think I observe you?” Mrs Dallow asked, with an irony tempered by a tenderness that was unsuccessfully concealed.
     “Ah, my darling, what you observe!” Nick exclaimed, laughing and stopping. But he added the next moment, more seriously, as if his tone had been disrespectful: “You probe me to the bottom, no doubt.”
     “You needn’t come either to Griffin or to Severals if you don’t want to.”
     “Give them up yourself; stay here with me!”
     She coloured quickly, as he said this, and broke out: “Lord! how you hate political houses!”
     “How can you say that, when from February to August I spend every blessed night in one?”
     “Yes, and hate that worst of all.”
     “So do half the people who are in it. You must have so many things, so many people, so much mise-en-scène and such a perpetual spectacle to live,” Nick went on. “Perpetual motion, perpetual visits, perpetual crowds! If you go into the country you’ll see forty people every day and be mixed up with them all day. The idea of a quiet fortnight in town, when by a happy if idiotic superstition everybody goes out of it, disconcerts and frightens me. It’s the very time, it’s the very place, to do a little work and possess one’s soul.”
     This vehement allocution found Mrs Dallow evidently somewhat unprepared; but she was sagacious enough, instead of attempting for the moment a general rejoinder, to seize on a single phrase and say: “Work? What work can you do in London at such a moment as this?”
     Nick hesitated a little. “I might tell you that I wanted to get up a lot of subjects, to sit at home and read blue-books; but that wouldn’t be quite what I mean.”
     “Do you mean you want to paint?”
     “Yes, that’s it, since you drag it out of me.”
     “Why do you make such a mystery about it? You’re at perfect liberty,” said Mrs Dallow.
     She extended her hand, to rest it on the mantel-shelf, but her companion took it on the way and held it in both his own. “You’re delightful, Julia, when you speak in that tone – then I know why it is I love you; but I can’t do anything if I go to Griffin, if I go to Severals.”
     “I see – I see.” said Julia, reflectively and kindly.
     “I’ve scarcely been inside of my studio for months and I feel quite homesick for it. The idea of putting in a few quiet days there has taken hold of me: I rather cling to it.”
     “It seems so odd, your having a studio!” Julia dropped, speaking so quickly that the words were almost incomprehensible.
     “Doesn’t it sound absurd, for all the good it does me, or I do in it? Of course one can produce nothing but rubbish on such terms – without continuity or persistence, with just a few days here and there. I ought to be ashamed of myself, no doubt; but even my rubbish interests me. ‘Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère.’ But I’ll go down to Harsh with you in a moment, Julia,” Nick pursued: “that would do as well, if we could be quiet there, without people, without a creature; and I should really be perfectly content. You’d sit for me; it would be the occasion we’ve so often wanted and never found.”
     Mrs Dallow shook her head slowly, with a smile that had a meaning for Nick. “Thank you, my dear; nothing would induce me to go to Harsh with you.”
     The young man looked at her. “What’s the matter, whenever it’s a question of anything of that sort? Are you afraid of me?” She pulled her hand quickly out of his, turning away from him; but he went on: “Stay with me here then, when everything is so right for it. We shall do beautifully – have the whole place, have the whole day to ourselves. Hang your engagements! Telegraph you won’t come. We’ll live at the studio – you’ll sit to me every day. Now or never is our chance – when shall we have so good a one? Think how charming it will be! I’ll make you wish awfully that I shall do something.”
     “I can’t get out of Griffin – it’s impossible,” returned Mrs Dallow, moving further away, with her back presented to him.
     “Then you are afraid of me – simply?”
     She turned quickly round, very pale. “Of course I am; you are welcome to know it.”
     He went toward her and for a moment she seemed to make another slight movement of retreat. This however was scarcely perceptible, and there was nothing to alarm in the tone of reasonable entreaty in which Nick said to her as he went towards her: “Put an end, Julia, to our absurd situation – it really can’t go on: you have no right to expect a man to be happy or comfortable in so false a position. We’re talked of odiously – of that we may be sure; and yet what good have we of it?”
     “Talked of? Do I care for that?”
     “Do you mean you’re indifferent because there are no grounds? That’s just why I hate it.”
     “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” exclaimed Mrs Dallow, with quick disdain.
     “Be my wife to-morrow – be my wife next week. Let us have done with this fantastic probation and be happy.”
     “Leave me now – come back to-morrow. I’ll write to you.” She had the air of pleading with him at present as he pleaded with her.
     “You can’t resign yourself to the idea of one’s looking ‘out of it’!” laughed Nick.
     “Come to-morrow, before lunch,” Mrs Dallow continued.
     “To be told I must wait six months more and then be sent about my business? Ah, Julia, Julia!” murmured the young man.
     Something in this simple exclamation – it sounded natural and perfectly unstudied – evidently on the instant made a great impression on his companion. “You shall wait no longer,” she said after a short silence.
     “What do you mean by no longer?”
     “Give me about five weeks – say till the Whitsuntide recess.”
     “Five weeks are a great deal,” smiled Nick.
     “There are things to be done – you ought to understand.”
     “I only understand how I love you.”
     “Dearest Nick!” said Mrs Dallow; upon which he caught her in his arms.
     “I have your promise then for five weeks hence, to a day?” he demanded, as she released herself.
     “We’ll settle that – the exact day: there are things to consider and to arrange. Come to luncheon to-morrow.”
     “I’ll come early – I’ll come at one,” Nick said; and for a moment they stood smiling at each other.
     “Do you think I want to wait, any more than you?” Mrs Dallow asked.
     “I don’t feel so much out of it now!” he exclaimed, by way of answer. “You’ll stay, of course, now – you’ll give up your visits?”
     She had hold of the lappet of his coat; she had kept it in her hand even while she detached herself from his embrace. There was a white flower in his buttonhole which she looked at and played with a moment before she said: “I have a better idea – you needn’t come to Griffin. Stay in your studio – do as you like – paint dozens of pictures.”
     “Dozens? Barbarian!” Nick ejaculated.
     The epithet apparently had an endearing suggestion to Mrs Dallow; at any rate it led her to allow him to kiss her on her forehead – led her to say: “What on earth do I want but that you should do absolutely as you please and be as happy as you can?”
     Nick kissed her again, in another place, at this; but he inquired: “What dreadful proposition is coming now?”
     “I’ll go off and do up my visits and come back.”
     “And leave me alone?”
     “Don’t be affected!” said Mrs Dallow. “You know you’ll work much better without me. You’ll live in your studio – I shall be well out of the way.”
     “That’s not what one wants of a sitter. How can I paint you?”
     “You can paint me all the rest of your life. I shall be a perpetual sitter.”
     “I believe I could paint you without looking at you.” said Nick, smiling down at her. “You do excuse me, then, from those dreary places?”
     “How can I insist, after what you said about the pleasure of keeping these days?” Mrs Dallow asked sweetly.
     “You’re the best woman on earth; though it does seem odd you should rush away as soon as our little business is settled.”
     “We shall make it up. I know what I’m about. And now go!” Mrs Dallow terminated, almost pushing her visitor out of the room.

     It was certainly singular under the circumstances that on sitting down in his studio after Julia had left town Nick Dormer should not, as regards the effort to reproduce some beautiful form, have felt more chilled by the absence of a friend who was such an embodiment of beauty. She was away and he longed for her, and yet without her the place was more filled with what he wanted to find in it. He turned into it with confused feelings, the most definite of which was a sense of release and recreation. It looked blighted and lonely and dusty, and his old studies, as he rummaged them out, struck him as even clumsier than the last time he had ventured to drop his eyes on them. But amid this neglected litter, in the colourless and obstructed light of a high north window which needed washing, he tasted more sharply the possibility of positive happiness: it appeared to him that, as he had said to Julia, he was more in possession of his soul. It was frivolity and folly, it was puerility to spend valuable hours pottering over the vain implements of an art he had relinquished; and a certain shame that he had felt in presenting his plea to Julia Dallow that Sunday night arose from the sense not of what he clung to, but of what he had given up. He had turned his back upon serious work, so that pottering was now all he could aspire to. It couldn’t be fruitful, it couldn’t be anything but ridiculous, almost ignoble; but it soothed his nerves, it was in the nature of a secret dissipation. He had never suspected that he should ever have on his own part nerves to count with; but this possibility had been revealed to him on the day it became clear that he was letting something precious go. He was glad he had not to justify himself to the critical, for this might have been a delicate business. The critical were mostly absent; and besides, shut up all day in his studio, how should he ever meet them? It was the place in the world where he felt furthest away from his constituents. This was a part of the pleasure – the consciousness that for the hour the coast was clear and his mind was free. His mother and his sister had gone to Broadwood: Lady Agnes (the phrase sounds brutal, but it represents his state of mind) was well out of the way. He had written to her as soon as Julia left town – he had apprised her of the fact that his wedding-day was fixed: a relief, for poor Lady Agnes, to a period of intolerable mystification, of taciturn wondering and watching. She had said her say the day of the poll at Harsh; she was too proud to ask and too discreet to ‘nag’: so she could only wait for something that didn’t arrive. The unconditioned loan of Broadwood had of course been something of a bribe to patience: she had at first felt that on the day she should take possession of that capital house Julia would indeed seem to have come into the family. But the gift had confirmed expectations just enough to make disappointment more bitter; and the discomfort was greater in proportion as Lady Agnes failed to discover what was the matter. Her daughter Grace was much occupied with this question and brought it up in conversation in a manner irritating to her ladyship, who had a high theory of being silent about it, but who however, in the long run, was more unhappy when, in consequence of a reprimand, the girl suggested no reasons at all than when she suggested stupid ones. It eased Lady Agnes a little to discuss the mystery when she could have the air of not having begun.
     The letter Nick received from her the first day of Passion Week in reply to his important communication was the only one he read at that moment; not counting of course several notes that Mrs Dallow addressed to him from Griffin. There were letters piled up, as he knew, in Calcutta Gardens, which his servant had strict orders not to bring to the studio. Nick slept now in the bedroom attached to this retreat; got things as he wanted them from Calcutta Gardens; and dined at his club, where a stray surviving friend or two, seeing him prowl about the library in the evening, was free to suppose that such eccentricity had a crafty political basis. When he thought of his neglected letters he remembered Mr Carteret’s convictions on the subject of not ‘getting behind’; they made him laugh, in the slightly sonorous painting-room, as he bent over one of the old canvases that he had ventured to turn to the light. He was fully determined however to master his correspondence before going down, the last thing before Parliament should re-assemble, to spend another day at Beauclere. Mastering his correspondence meant in Nick’s mind breaking open envelopes; writing answers was scarcely involved in the idea. But Mr Carteret would never guess that. Nick was not moved even to write to him that the affair with Mrs Dallow was on the point of taking the form he had been so good as to desire: he reserved the pleasure of this announcement for a personal interview.
     The day before Good Friday, in the morning, his stillness was broken by a rat-tat-tat on the outer door of his studio, administered apparently by the knob of a walking-stick. His servant was out and he went to the door, wondering who his visitor could be at such a time, especially of the familiar class. The class was indicated by the visitor’s failure to look for the bell; for there was a bell, though it required a little research. In a moment the mystery was solved: the gentleman who stood smiling at him from the threshold could only be Gabriel Nash. Dormer had not seen this whimsical personage for several months and had had no news of him beyond the general intimation that he was abroad. His old friend had sufficiently prepared him at the time of their reunion in Paris for the idea of the fitful in intercourse: and he had not been ignorant on his return from Paris that he should have had an opportunity to miss him if he had not been too busy to take advantage of it. In London, after the episode at Harsh, Gabriel had not reappeared: he had redeemed none of the pledges given the night they walked together to Notre Dame and conversed on important matters. He was to have interposed in Nick’s destiny, but he had not interposed; he was to have dragged him in the opposite sense from Mrs Dallow, but there had been no dragging; he was to have saved him, as he called it, and yet Nick was lost. This circumstance indeed constituted his excuse: the member for Harsh had rushed so to perdition. Nick had for the hour seriously wished to keep hold of him: he valued him as a salutary influence. Yet when he came to his senses after his election our young man had recognized that Nash might very well have reflected on the thanklessness of such a slippery subject – might have considered that he was released from his vows. Of course it had been particularly in the event of a Liberal triumph that he had threatened to make himself felt; the effect of a brand plucked from the burning would be so much greater if the flames were already high. Yet Nick had not held him to the letter of this pledge, and had so fully admitted the right of a properly-constituted æsthete to lose patience with him that he was now far from greeting his visitor with a reproach. He felt much more thrown on his defence.
     Gabriel did not attack him however. He brought in only blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the mystic voice – it was really a remarkable case of second sight – which had whispered to him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town. He had just come back from Sicily, after a southern winter, according to a custom frequent with him, and had been moved by a miraculous prescience, unfavourable as the moment might seem, to go and ask for Nick in Calcutta Gardens, where he had extracted from his friend’s servant an address not known to all the world. He showed Nick what a mistake it had been to fear a reproach from Gabriel Nash, and how he habitually ignored all lapses and kept up the standard only by taking a hundred fine things for granted. He also abounded more than ever in his own sense, reminding his friend how no recollection of him, no evocation of him in absence could do him justice. You couldn’t recall him without seeming to exaggerate him, and then recognized when you saw him that your exaggeration had fallen short. He emerged out of vagueness (his Sicily might have been the Sicily of ‘A Winter’s Tale’), and would evidently be reabsorbed in it; but his presence was positive and pervasive enough. He was very lively while he lasted. His connections were with beauty, urbanity and conversation, as usual, but it was a circle you couldn’t find in the Court Guide. Nick had a sense that he knew ‘a lot of æsthetic people’, but he dealt in ideas much more than in names and addresses. He was genial and jocose, sunburnt and romantically allusive. Nick gathered that he had been living for many days in a Saracenic tower, where his principal occupation was to watch for the flushing of the west. He had retained all the serenity of his opinions, and made light, with a candour of which the only defect was apparently that it was not quite enough a conscious virtue, of many of the objects of common esteem. When Nick asked him what he had been doing he replied: “Oh, living, you know”; and the tone of the words seemed to offer them as a record of magnificent success. He made a long visit, staying to luncheon and after luncheon, so that the little studio heard all at once more conversation, and of a wider scope, than in the several previous years of its history. With much of our story left to tell, it is a pity that so little of this rich colloquy may be transcribed here; because, as affairs took their course, it marked really (if it be a question of noting the exact point) a turn of the tide in Nick Dormer’s personal situation. He was destined to remember the accent with which Nash exclaimed, on his drawing forth sundry specimens of amateurish earnestness: “I say – I say – I say!”
     Nick glanced round with a heightened colour. “They’re pretty bad, eh?”
     “Oh, you’re a deep one!” Nash went on.
     “What’s the matter?”
     “Do you call your conduct that of a man of honour?”
     “Scarcely, perhaps. But when no one has seen them!”
     “That’s your villainy. C’est de l’exquis, du pur exquis. Come, my dear fellow, this is very serious – it’s a bad business,” said Gabriel Nash. Then he added, almost with austerity: “You’ll be so good as to place before me every patch of paint, every sketch and scrap that this room contains.”
     Nick complied in great good-humour. He turned out his boxes and drawers, shovelled forth the contents of bulging portfolios, mounted on chairs to unhook old canvases that had been severely ‘skied’. He was modest and docile and patient and amused, and above all quite thrilled – thrilled with the idea of eliciting a note of appreciation so late in the day. It was the oddest thing how at present in fact he found himself attributing value to Gabriel Nash – attributing to him, among attributions more confused, the dignity of judgement, the authority of intelligence. Nash was an ambiguous being, but he was an excellent touchstone. The two said very little for a while, and they had almost half an hour’s silence, during which, after Nick had hastily improvised a little exhibition, there was only a puffing of cigarettes. The visitor walked about, looking at this and that, taking up rough studies and laying them down, asking a question of fact, fishing with his umbrella, on the floor, amid a pile of unarranged sketches. Nick accepted jocosely the attitude of suspense, but there was even more of it in his heart than in his face. So few people had seen his young work – almost no one who really counted. He had been ashamed of it, never showing it to bring on a conclusion, inasmuch as it was precisely of a conclusion that he was afraid. He whistled now while he let his companion take time. He rubbed old panels with his sleeve and dabbed wet sponges on surfaces that had sunk. It was a long time since he had felt so gay, strange as such an assertion sounds in regard to a young man whose bridal-day had at his urgent solicitation lately been fixed. He had stayed in town to be alone with his imagination, and suddenly, paradoxically, the sense of that result had arrived with Gabriel Nash.
     “Nicholas Dormer,” this personage remarked at last, “for grossness of immorality I think I have never seen your equal.”
     “That sounds so well that I hesitate to risk spoiling it by wishing it explained.”
     “Don’t you recognize in any degree the elevated idea of duty?”
     “If I don’t grasp it with a certain firmness I’m a great failure, for I was quite brought up in it” Nick said.
     “Then you are the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after all.”
     “Do I gather that you yourself recognize obligations of the order you allude to?” asked Nick.
     “Do you ‘gather’?” Nash stared. “Why, aren’t they the very flame of my faith, the burden of my song?”
     “My dear fellow, duty is doing, and I inferred that you think rather poorly of doing – that it spoils one’s style.”
     “Doing wrong, assuredly.”
     “But what do you call right? What’s your canon of certainty there?”
     “The conscience that’s in us – that charming, conversible, infinite thing, the intensest thing we know. But you must treat the oracle civilly if you wish to make it speak. You mustn’t stride into the temple in muddy jack-boots, with your hat on your head, as the Puritan troopers tramped into the dear old abbeys. One must do one’s best to find out the right, and your criminality appears to be that you have not taken common trouble.”
     “I hadn’t you to ask,” smiled Nick. “But duty strikes me as doing something. If you are too afraid it may be the wrong thing, you may let everything go.”
     “Being is doing, and if doing is duty, being is duty. Do you follow?”
     “At a great distance.”
     “To be what one may be, really and efficaciously,” Nash went on, “to feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it – that’s conduct, that’s life.”
     “And suppose one’s a brute or an ass, where’s the efficacy?”
     “In one’s very want of intelligence. In such cases one is out of it – the question doesn’t exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others. The brute, the ass, neither feels, nor understands, nor accepts, nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that, to profit by them, we must be as perceptive as we can. We must recognize our particular form, the instrument that each of us – each of us who carries anything – carries in his being. Mastering the instrument, learning to play it in perfection – that’s what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success.”
     Nick listened with friendly attention and the air of general assent was in his face as he said: “Every one has it then, this individual pipe?”
     “‘Every one’, my dear fellow, is too much to say, for the world is full of the crudest remplissage. The book of life is padded, ah but padded – a deplorable want of editing. I speak of every one that is any one. Of course there are pipes and pipes – little quavering flutes for the concerted movements and big cornets-à-piston for the great solos.”
     “I see, I see. And what might your instrument be?”
     Nash hesitated not a moment; his answer was radiantly ready. “To speak to people just as I am speaking to you. To prevent for instance a great wrong being done.”
     “A great wrong?”
     “Yes – to the human race. I talk – I talk; I say the things that other people don’t, that they can’t, that they won’t,” Gabriel continued, with his inimitable candour.
     “If it’s a question of mastery and perfection, you certainly have them,” his companion replied.
     “And you haven’t, alas; that’s the pity of it, that’s the scandal. That’s the wrong I want to set right, before it becomes too public a shame. I called you just now grossly immoral, on account of the spectacle you present – a spectacle to be hidden from the eye of ingenuous youth: that of a man neglecting his own fiddle to blunder away on that of one of his fellows. We can’t afford such mistakes, we can’t tolerate such licence.”
     “You think then I have a fiddle?” asked Nick.
     “A regular Stradivarius! All these things you have shown me are singularly interesting. You have a talent of a wonderfully pure strain.”
     “I say – I say – I say!” Nick exclaimed, standing in front of his visitor with his hands in his pockets and a blush on his smiling face, and repeating with a change of accent Nash’s exclamation of half an hour before.
     “I like it, your talent; I measure it, I appreciate it, I insist upon it,” Nash went on, between the whiffs of his cigarette. “I have to be accomplished to do so, but fortunately I am. In such a case that’s my duty. I shall make you my business for a while. Therefore,” Nash added, piously, “don’t say I’m unconscious of the moral law.”
     “A Stradivarius?” said Nick, interrogatively, with his eyes wide open and the thought in his mind of how different this was from having gone to Griffin.

     Gabriel Nash had plenty of further opportunity to elucidate this and other figurative remarks, for he not only spent several of the middle hours of the day with his friend, but came back with him in the evening (they dined together at a little foreign pot-house in Soho, revealed to Nick on this occasion) and discussed the great question far into the night. The great question was whether, on the showing of those examples of his ability with which the room in which they sat was now densely bestrewn, Nick Dormer would be justified in ‘really going in’ for the practice of pictorial art. This may strike many of my readers as a limited and even trivial inquiry, with little of the heroic or the romantic in it; but it was none the less carried to a very fine point by our clever young men. Nick suspected Nash of exaggerating his encouragement in order to play a malign trick on the political world, at whose expense it was his fancy to divert himself (without making that organization bankrupt assuredly), and reminded him that his present accusation of immorality was strangely inconsistent with the wanton hope expressed by him in Paris – the hope that the Liberal candidate at Harsh would be returned. Nash replied first: “Oh, I hadn’t been in this place then!” but he defended himself more effectually in saying that it was not of Nick’s having got elected that he complained: it was of his visible hesitancy to throw up his seat. Nick requested that he wouldn’t speak of this, and his gallantry failed to render him incapable of saying: “The fact is I haven’t the nerve for it.” They talked then for a while of what he could do, not of what he couldn’t; of the mysteries and miracles of reproduction and representation; of the strong, sane joys of the artistic life. Nick made afresh, with more fullness, his great confession, that his private ideal of happiness was the life of a great painter of portraits. He uttered his thought about this so copiously and lucidly that Nash’s own abundance was stilled, and he listened almost as if he had been listening to something new, difficult as it was to suppose that there could be a point of view in relation to such a matter with which he was unacquainted.
     “There it is,” said Nick at last – “there’s the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years copying the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it: out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains and party treacheries – of humbuggery, hypocrisy and cant. The cleanness and quietness of it, the independent effort to do something, to leave something which shall give joy to man long after the howling has died away to the last ghost of an echo – such a vision solicits me at certain hours with an almost irresistible force.”
     As he dropped these remarks Nick lolled on a big divan, with one of his long legs folded up; and his visitor stopped in front of him, after moving about the room vaguely and softly, almost on tiptoe, not to interrupt him. “You speak with the eloquence that rises to a man’s lips on a very particular occasion; when he has practically, whatever his theory may be, renounced the right and dropped hideously into the wrong. Then his regret for the right, a certain exquisite appreciation of it, takes on an accent which I know well how to recognize.”
     Nick looked up at him a moment. “You’ve hit it, if you mean by that that I haven’t resigned my seat and that I don’t intend to.”
     “I thought you took it only to give it up. Don’t you remember our talk in Paris?”
     “I like to be a part of the spectacle that amuses you, but I scarcely have taken so much trouble as that for it.”
     “But isn’t it an absurd comedy, the life you lead?”
     “Comedy or tragedy – I don’t know which; whatever it is I appear to be capable of it to please two or three people.”
     “Then you can take trouble,” said Nash.
     “Yes, for the woman I’m to marry.”
     “Ah, you’re to marry?”
     “That’s what has come on since we met in Paris, and it makes just the difference.”
     “Ah, my poor friend,” smiled Gabriel, standing there, “no wonder you have an eloquence, an accent!”
     “It’s a pity I have them in the wrong place. I’m expected to have them in the House of Commons.”
     “You will when you make your farewell speech there – to announce that you chuck it up. And may I venture to ask who’s to be your wife?” Gabriel went on.
     “Mrs Dallow has kindly consented. I think you saw her in Paris.”
     “Ah, yes: you spoke of her to me. I remember asking you if you were in love with her.”
     “I wasn’t then.”
     Nash hesitated a moment. “And are you now?”
     “Oh dear, yes,” said Nick.
     “That would be better if it wasn’t worse.”
     “Nothing could be better; it’s the best thing that can happen to me.”
     “Well,” said Nash, “you must let me very respectfully approach her. You must let me bring her round.”
     “Bring her round?”
     “Talk her over.”
     “Over to what?” Nick repeated his companion’s words, a little as if it were to gain time, remembering the effect Gabriel Nash had produced upon Julia – an effect which scantily ministered to the idea of another meeting. Julia had had no occasion to allude again to Nick’s imperturbable friend; he had passed out of her life at once and forever; but there flickered up a vivid recollection of the contempt he had led her to express, together with a sense of how odd she would think it that her intended should have thrown over two pleasant visits to cultivate such company.
     “Over to a proper pride in what you may do – what you may do above all if she will help you.”
     “I scarcely see how she can help me,” said Nick, with an air of thinking.
     “She’s extremely handsome, as I remember her: you could do great things with her.”
     “Ah, there’s the rub,” Nick went on. “I wanted her to sit for me this week, but she wouldn’t.”
     “Elle a bien tort. You should do some fine strong type. Is Mrs Dallow in London?” Nash inquired.
     “For what do you take her? She’s paying visits.”
     “Then I have a model for you.”
     “Then you have—?” Nick stared. “What has that to do with Mrs Dallow’s being away?”
     “Doesn’t it give you more time?”
     “Oh, the time flies!” sighed Nick, in a manner that caused his companion to break into a laugh – a laugh in which for a moment he himself joined, blushing a little.
     “Does she like you to paint?” Nash continued, with one of his candid intonations.
     “So she says.”
     “Well, do something fine to show her.”
     “I’d rather show it to you,” Nick confessed.
     “My dear fellow, I see it from here, if you do your duty. Do you remember the Tragic Muse?” Nash pursued, explicatively.
     “The Tragic Muse?”
     “That girl in Paris, whom we heard at the old actress’s and whom we afterwards met at the charming entertainment given by your cousin (isn’t he?) the secretary of embassy.”
     “Oh, Peter’s girl: of course I remember her.”
     “Don’t call her Peter’s; call her rather mine,” Nash said, with good-humoured dissuasiveness. “I invented her, I introduced her, I revealed her.”
     “I thought on the contrary you ridiculed and repudiated her.”
     “As an individual, surely not; I seem to myself to have been all the while rendering her services. I said I disliked tea-party ranters, and so I do; but if my estimate of her powers was below the mark she has more than punished me.”
     “What has she done?” asked Nick.
     “She has become interesting, as I suppose you know.”
     “How should I know?”
     “You must see her, you must paint her,” said Nash. “She tells me that something was said about it that day at Madame Carré’s.”
     “Oh, I remember – said by Peter.”
     “Then it will please Mr Sherringham – you’ll be glad to do that. I suppose you know all he has done for Miriam?”
     “Not a bit. I know nothing about Peter’s affairs, unless it be in general that he goes in for mountebanks and mimes and that it occurs to me I have heard one of my sisters mention – the rumour had come to her – that he has been backing Miss Rooth.”
     “Miss Rooth delights to talk of his kindness: she’s charming when she speaks of it. It’s to his good offices that she owes her appearing here.”
     “Here! Is she in London?” Nick inquired.
     “D’où tombez-vous? I thought you people read the papers.”
     “What should I read, when I sit (sometimes!) through the stuff they put into them?”
     “Of course I see that – that your engagement at your own theatre keeps you from going to others. Learn then,” said Gabriel Nash, “that you have a great competitor and that you are distinctly not, much as you may suppose it, the rising comedian. The Tragic Muse is the great modern personage. Haven’t you heard people speak of her, haven’t you been taken to see her?”
     “I dare say I’ve heard of her; but with a good many other things on my mind I had forgotten it.”
     “Certainly I can imagine what has been on your mind. She remembers you at any rate; she repays neglect with sympathy. She wants to come and see you.”
     “To see me?”
     “To be seen by you – it comes to the same thing. She’s worth seeing: you must let me bring her; you’ll find her very suggestive. That idea that you should paint her – she appears to consider it a sort of bargain.”
     “A bargain? What will she give me?” Nick asked.
     “A splendid model. She is splendid.”
     “Oh, then bring her,” said Nick.

     Nash brought her, the great modern personage as he had described her, the very next day, and it took Nick Dormer but a short time to appreciate his declaration that Miriam Rooth was splendid. She had made an impression upon him ten months before, but it had haunted him only for a day, immediately overlaid with other images. Yet after Nash had spoken of her a few moments he evoked her again; some of her attitudes, some of her tones began to hover before him. He was pleased in advance with the idea of painting her. When she stood there in fact however it seemed to him that he had remembered her wrong: the brilliant young lady who instantly filled his studio with a presence that it had never known was exempt from the curious clumsiness which had interfused his former admiration of her with a certain pity. Miriam Rooth was light and bright and straight to-day – straight without being stiff and bright without being garish. To Nick’s perhaps inadequately sophisticated mind the model, the actress were figures with a vulgar setting; but it would have been impossible to show that taint less than his present extremely natural yet extremely distinguished visitor. She was more natural even than Gabriel Nash (‘nature’ was still Nick’s formula for his old friend), and beside her he appeared almost commonplace.
     Nash recognized her superiority with a frankness that was honourable to both of them, testifying in this manner to his sense that they were all three serious beings, worthy to deal with realities. She attracted crowds to her theatre, but to his appreciation of such a fact as that, important doubtless in its way, there were limits which he had already expressed. What he now felt bound in all integrity to express was his perception that she had, in general and quite apart from the question of the box-office, a remarkable, a very remarkable artistic nature. He confessed that she had surprised him there; knowing of her in other days mainly that she was hungry to adopt an overrated profession, he had not imputed to her the normal measure of intelligence. Now he saw – he had had some talks with her – that she was intelligent; so much so that he was sorry for the embarrassment it would be to her. Nick could imagine the discomfort of having that sort of commodity to dispose of in such conditions. “She’s a distinguished woman – really a distinguished woman,” Nash explained, kindly and lucidly, almost paternally; “and the head you can see for yourself.”
     Miriam, smiling, as she sat on an old Venetian chair, held aloft, with the noblest effect, that portion of her person to which this patronage was extended, and remarked to Nick that, strange as it might appear, she had got quite to like poor Mr Nash: she could make him go about with her; it was a relief to her mother.
     “When I take him she has perfect peace,” the girl said; “then she can stay at home and see the interviewers. She delights in that and I hate it, so our friend here is a great comfort. Of course a femme de théâtre is supposed to be able to go out alone, but there’s a kind of appearance, an added chic, in having some one. People think he’s my companion; I’m sure they fancy I pay him. I would pay him rather than give him up, for it doesn’t matter that he’s not a lady. He is one in tact and sympathy, as you see. And base as he thinks the sort of thing I do, he can’t keep away from the theatre. When you’re celebrated, people will look at you who before could never find out for themselves why they should.”
     “When you’re celebrated you become handsomer; at least that’s what has happened to you, though you were pretty too of old,” Gabriel argued. “I go to the theatre to look at your head; it gives me the greatest pleasure. I take up anything of that sort as soon as I find it; one never knows how long it may last.”
     “Are you speaking of my appearance?” Miriam asked.
     “Dear no, of my own pleasure, the first freshness,” Nash went on. “Dormer at least, let me tell you in justice to him, hasn’t waited till you were celebrated to want to see you again (he stands there open-eyed); for the simple reason that he hadn’t the least idea of your renown. I had to announce it to him.”
     “Haven’t you seen me act?” Miriam asked, without reproach, of her host.
     “I’ll go to-night,” said Nick.
     “You have your Parliament, haven’t you? What do they call it – the demands of public life?” Miriam continued: to which Gabriel Nash rejoined that he had the demands of private as well, inasmuch as he was in love – he was on the point of being married. Miriam listened to this with participation; then she said: “Ah, then, do bring your – what do they call her in English? I’m always afraid of saying something improper – your future. I’ll send you a box, under the circumstances; you’d like that better.” She added that if he were to paint her he would have to see her often on the stage, wouldn’t he? to profit by the optique de la scène (what did they call that in English?) studying her and fixing his impression. Before he had time to respond to this proposition she asked him if it disgusted him to hear her speak like that, as if she were always posing and thinking about herself, living only to be looked at, thrusting forward her person. She often got sick of doing so, already; but à la guerre comme à la guerre.
     “That’s the fine artistic nature, you see – a sort of divine disgust breaking out in her,” Nash expounded.
     “If you want to paint me at all, of course. I’m struck with the way I’m taking that for granted,” Miriam continued. “When Mr Nash spoke of it to me I jumped at the idea. I remembered our meeting in Paris and the kind things you said to me. But no doubt one oughtn’t to jump at ideas when they represent serious sacrifices on the part of others.”
     “Doesn’t she speak well!” Nash exclaimed to Nick. “Oh, she’ll go far!”
     “It’s a great privilege to me to paint you; what title in the world have I to pretend to such a model?” Nick replied to Miriam. “The sacrifice is yours – a sacrifice of time and good-nature and credulity. You come in your beauty and your genius to this shabby place where I’ve nothing to show, not a guarantee to offer you; and I wonder what I’ve done to deserve such a gift of the gods.”
     “Doesn’t he speak well?” Nash demanded, smiling, of Miriam.
     She took no notice of him, but she repeated to Nick that she hadn’t forgotten his friendly attitude in Paris; and when he answered that he surely had done very little she broke out, first resting her eyes on him a moment with a deep, reasonable smile and then springing up quickly: “Ah, well, if I must justify myself, I liked you!”
     “Fancy my appearing to challenge you!” laughed Nick. “To see you again is to want tremendously to try something; but you must have an infinite patience, because I’m an awful duffer.”
     Miriam looked round the walls. “I see what you have done – bien des choses.”
     “She understands – she understands,” Gabriel dropped. And he added to Miriam: “Imagine, when he might do something, his choosing a life of shams! At bottom he’s like you – a wonderful artistic nature.”
     “I’ll have patience,” said the girl, smiling at Nick.
     “Then, my children, I leave you – the peace of the Lord be with you.” With these words Nash took his departure.
     The others chose a position for Miriam’s sitting, after she had placed herself in many different attitudes and different lights; but an hour had elapsed before Nick got to work – began, on a large canvas, to knock her in, as he called it. He was hindered a little even by a certain nervousness, the emotion of finding himself, out of a clear sky, confronted with such a sitter and launched in such a task. The situation was incongruous, just after he had formally renounced all manner of ‘art’ – the renunciation taking effect not a bit the less from the whim that he had consciously treated himself to as a whim (the last he should ever indulge), the freak of relapsing for a fortnight into a fingering of old sketches, for the purpose, as he might have said, of burning them up, of clearing out his studio and terminating his lease. There were both embarrassment and inspiration in the strange chance of snatching back for an hour a relinquished joy: the jump with which he found he could still rise to such an occasion took away his breath a little, at the same time that the idea – the idea of what one might make of such material – touched him with an irresistible wand. On the spot, to his inner vision, Miriam became a magnificent result, drawing a hundred formative instincts out of their troubled sleep, defying him where he privately felt strongest and imposing herself triumphantly in her own strength. He had the good fortune to see her, as a subject, without striking matches, in a vivid light, and his quick attempt was as exciting as a sudden gallop – it was almost the sense of riding a runaway horse.
     She was in her way so fine that he could only think how to ‘do’ her: that hard calculation soon flattened out the consciousness, lively in him at first, that she was a beautiful woman who had sought him out in his retirement. At the end of their first sitting her having sought him out appeared the most natural thing in the world: he had a perfect right to entertain her there – explanations and complications were engulfed in the productive mood. The business of ‘knocking her in’ held up a lamp to her beauty, showed him how much there was of it and that she was infinitely interesting. He didn’t want to fall in love with her (that would be a sell! as he said to himself), and she promptly became much too interesting for that. Nick might have reflected, for simplification’s sake, as his cousin Peter had done, but with more validity, that he was engaged with Miss Rooth in an undertaking that didn’t in the least refer to themselves, that they were working together seriously and that work was a suspension of sensibility. But after her first sitting (she came, poor girl, but twice), the need of such exorcisms passed from his spirit: he had so thoroughly, practically taken her up. As to whether Miriam had the same bright, still sense of co-operation to a definite end, the sense of the distinctively technical nature of the answer to every question to which the occasion might give birth, that mystery would he cleared up only if it were open to us to regard this young lady through some other medium than the mind of her friends. We have chosen, as it happens, for some of the advantages it carries with it, the indirect vision; and it fails as yet to tell us (what Nick of course wondered about before he ceased to care, as indeed he intimated to his visitor) why a young person crowned with success should have taken it into her head that there was something for her in so blighted a spot. She should have gone to one of the regular people, the great people: they would have welcomed her with open arms. When Nick asked her if some of the R.A.’s hadn’t expressed a desire to have a crack at her she said: “Oh, dear, no, only the tiresome photographers; and fancy them, in the future! If mamma could only do that for me!” And she added, with the charming fellowship for which she was conspicuous on this occasion: “You know I don’t think any one yet has been quite so much struck with me as you.”
     “Not even Peter Sherringham?” asked Nick, laughing and stepping back to judge of the effect of a line.
     “Oh, Mr Sherringham’s different. You’re an artist.”
     “For heaven’s sake, don’t say that!” cried Nick. “And as regards your art I thought Peter knew more than any one.”
     “Ah, you’re severe,” said Miriam.
     “Severe?”
     “Because that’s what he thinks. But he does know a lot – he has been a providence to me.”
     “And why hasn’t he come here to see you act?”
     Miriam hesitated a moment. “How do you know he hasn’t come?”
     “Because I take for granted he would have called on me if he had.”
     “Does he like you very much?” asked Miriam.
     “I don’t know. I like him.”
     “He’s a gentleman – pour cela,” said Miriam.
     “Oh, yes, for that!” Nick went on absently, sketching hard.
     “But he’s afraid of me – afraid to see me.”
     “Doesn’t he think you’re good enough?”
     “On the contrary – he believes I shall carry him away and he’s in a terror of my doing it.”
     “He ought to like that,” said Nick.
     “That’s what I mean when I say he’s not an artist. However, he declares he does like it, only it appears it is not the right thing for him. Oh, the right thing – he’s bent upon getting that. But it’s not for me to blame him, for I am too. He’s coming some night, however: he shall have a dose!”
     “Poor Peter!” Nick exclaimed, with a compassion none the less real because it was mirthful: the girl’s tone was so expressive of good-humoured, unscrupulous power.
     “He’s such a curious mixture,” Miriam went on; “sometimes I lose patience with him. It isn’t exactly trying to serve both God and Mammon, but it’s muddling up the stage and the world. The world be hanged; the stage, or anything of that sort (I mean one’s faith), comes first.”
     “Brava, brava, you do me good,” Nick murmured, still hilarious and at his work. “But it’s very kind of you, when I was in this absurd state of ignorance, to attribute to me the honour of having been more struck with you than any one else,” he continued, after a moment.
     “Yes, I confess I don’t quite see – when the shops were full of my photographs.”
     “Oh, I’m so poor – I don’t go into shops,” returned Nick.
     “Are you very poor?”
     “I live on alms.”
     “And don’t they pay you – the government, the ministry?”
     “Dear young lady, for what? – for shutting myself up with beautiful women?”
     “Ah, you have others, then?” asked Miriam.
     “They are not so kind as you, I confess.”
     “I’ll buy it from you – what you’re doing: I’ll pay you well when it’s done,” said the girl. “I’ve got money now; I make it, you know – a good lot of it. It’s too delightful, after scraping and starving. Try it and you’ll see. Give up the base, bad world.”
     “But isn’t it supposed to be the base, bad world that pays?”
     “Precisely; make it pay, without mercy – squeeze it dry. That’s what it’s meant for – to pay for art. Ah, if it wasn’t for that! I’ll bring you a quantity of photographs, to-morrow – you must let me come back to-morrow: it’s so amusing to have them, by the hundred, all for nothing, to give away. That’s what takes mamma most: she can’t get over it. That’s luxury and glory; even at Castle Nugent they didn’t do that. People used to sketch me, but not so much as mamma veut bien le dire; and in all my life I never had but one poor little carte-de-visite, when I was sixteen, in a plaid frock, with the banks of a river, at three francs the dozen.”

     Nick Dormer went to Great Stanhope Street at five o’clock and learned, rather to his surprise, that Mrs Dallow was not at home – to his surprise because he had told her he would come at that hour, and he attributed to her, with a certain simplicity, an eager state of mind in regard to his explanation. Apparently she was not eager; the eagerness was his own – he was eager to explain. He recognized, not without a certain consciousness of magnanimity in doing so, that there had been some reason for her quick withdrawal from his studio, or at any rate for her extreme discomposure there. He had a few days before put in a plea for a snatch of worship in that sanctuary, and she had accepted and approved it; but the worship, when the curtain happened to blow back, proved to be that of a magnificent young woman, an actress with disordered hair, who wore in a singular degree the aspect of a person settled to spend the day. The explanation was easy: it resided in the circumstance that when one was painting, even very badly and only for a moment, one had to have models. Nick was impatient to give it, with frank, affectionate lips and a full, jocose admission that it was natural Julia should have been startled; and he was the more impatient that, though he would not in the least have expected her to like finding a strange woman domesticated for the hour under his roof, she had disliked it even more than would have seemed probable. That was because, not having heard from him about the matter, the impression was for the moment irresistible with her that a trick had been played her. But three minutes with him alone would make the difference.
     They would indeed have a considerable difference to make, Nick reflected, as minutes much more numerous elapsed without bringing Mrs Dallow home. For he had said to the butler that he would come in and wait (though it was odd she should not have left a message for him): she would doubtless return from one moment to the other. Nick had of course full licence to wait, anywhere he preferred; and he was ushered into Julia’s particular sitting-room and supplied with tea and the evening papers. After a quarter of an hour however he gave little attention to these beguilements, owing to the increase of his idea that it was odd that when she definitely knew he was coming she should not have taken more pains to be at home. He walked up and down and looked out of the window, took up her books and dropped them again, and then, as half an hour had elapsed, began to feel rather angry. What could she be about when, at a moment when London was utterly empty, she could not be paying visits? A footman came in to attend to the fire; whereupon Nick questioned him as to the manner in which Mrs Dallow was probably engaged. The man revealed the fact that his mistress had gone out only a quarter of an hour before Nick arrived, and, as if he appreciated the opportunity for a little decorous conversation, gave him still more information than he asked for. From this it appeared that, as Nick knew or could surmise, she had the evening previous, in the country, telegraphed for the victoria to meet her in the morning at Paddington and had gone straight from the station to the studio, while her maid, with her luggage, proceeded in a cab to Great Stanhope Street. On leaving the studio however she had not come directly home; she had chosen this unusual season for an hour’s drive in the Park. She had finally re-entered her house, but had remained up-stairs all day, seeing no one and not coming down to luncheon. At four o’clock she had ordered the brougham for four forty-five, and had got into it punctually, saying “To the Park!” as she did so.
     Nick, after the footman had left him, felt himself much mystified by Julia’s sudden passion for the banks of the Serpentine, forsaken and foggy now, inasmuch as the afternoon had come on gray and the light was waning. She usually hated the Park and she hated a closed carriage. He had a discomfortable vision of her, shrunken into a corner of her brougham and veiled as if she had been crying, revolving round the solitude of the Drive. She had of course been deeply disconcerted, and she was nervous and upset: the motion of the carriage soothed her and made her fidget less. Nick remembered that in the morning, at his door, she had appeared to be going home; so she had turned into the Park on second thoughts, as she passed. He lingered another half hour, walked up and down the room many times and thought of many things. Had she misunderstood him when he said he would come at five? Couldn’t she be sure, even if she had, that he would come early rather than late, and might she not have left a message for him on the chance? Going out that way a few minutes before he was to come had even a little the air of a thing done on purpose to offend him; as if she had been so displeased that she had taken the nearest occasion of giving him a sign that she meant to break. But were these the things that Julia did and was that the way she did them – his fine, proud, delicate, generous Julia?
     When six o’clock came poor Nick felt distinctly resentful; but he stayed ten minutes longer, on the possibility that Mrs Dallow would in the morning have understood him to mention that hour. The April dusk began to gather and the unsociability of her behaviour, especially if she were still rumbling about the Park, became absurd. Anecdotes came back to Nick, vaguely remembered, heard he couldn’t have said when or where, of poor artists for whom life had been rendered difficult by wives who wouldn’t allow them the use of the living female model and who made scenes if, on the staircase, they encountered such sources of inspiration. These ladies struck him as vulgar and odious persons, with whom it seemed grotesque that Julia should have anything in common. Of course she was not his wife yet, and of course if she were he should have washed his hands of every form of activity requiring the services of the sitter; but even these qualifications left him with a capacity to shudder at the way Julia just escaped ranking herself with the heavy-handed.
     At a quarter-past six he rang a bell and told the servant who answered it that he was going and that Mrs Dallow was to be informed as soon as she came in that he had expected to find her and had waited an hour and a quarter for her. But he had just reached the doorstep, on his departure, when her brougham emerging from the evening mist, stopped in front of the house. Nick stood at the door, hanging back till she got out, allowing the servants to help her. She saw him – she was not veiled, like his mental image of her, but this did not prevent her from pausing to give an order to the coachman, a matter apparently requiring some discussion. When she came to the door Nick remarked to her that he had been waiting an eternity for her; to which she replied that he must not make a grievance to her of that – she was too unwell to do justice to it. He immediately professed regret and sympathy, adding, however, that in that case she had much better not have gone out. She made no answer to this – there were three servants in the hall who looked as if they might understand at least what was not said to them: only when he followed her in she asked if his idea had been to stay longer.
     “Certainly, if you’re not too ill to see me.”
     “Come in, then,” Julia said, turning back after having gone to the foot of the stairs.
     This struck him immediately as a further restriction of his visit: she would not readmit him to the drawing-room or to her boudoir; she would receive him in an impersonal apartment down-stairs, in which she saw people on business. What did she want to do to him? He was prepared by this time for a scene of jealousy; for he was sure he had learned to read her character justly in feeling that if she had the appearance of a cold woman she had also on certain occasions a liability to extreme emotion. She was very still, but every now and then she would fire off a pistol. As soon as Nick had closed the door she said, without sitting down:
     “I dare say you saw I didn’t like that at all.”
     “My having a sitter, that way? I was very much annoyed at it myself,” Nick answered.
     “Why were you annoyed? She’s very handsome,” said Mrs Dallow, perversely.
     “I didn’t know you looked at her!” Nick laughed.
     Julia hesitated a moment. “Was I very rude?”
     “Oh, it was all right. It was only awkward for me, because you didn’t know,” Nick replied.
     “I did know; that’s why I came.”
     “How do you mean? My letter couldn’t have reached you.”
     “I don’t know anything about your letter,” said Mrs Dallow, casting about her for a chair and then seating herself on the edge of a sofa, with her eyes on the floor.
     “She sat to me yesterday; she was there all the morning; but I didn’t write to tell you. I went at her with great energy and, absurd as it may seem to you, found myself very tired afterwards. Besides, in the evening I went to see her act.”
     “Does she act?” asked Mrs Dallow.
     “She’s an actress; it’s her profession. Don’t you remember her that day at Peter’s, in Paris? She’s already a celebrity; she has great talent; she’s engaged at a theatre here and is making a sensation. As I tell you, I saw her last night.”
     “You needn’t tell me,” Mrs Dallow replied, looking up at him with a face of which the intense, the tragic sadness startled him.
     He had been standing before her, but at this he instantly sat down beside her, taking her passive hand. “I want to, please; otherwise it must seem so odd to you. I knew she was coming when I wrote to you the day before yesterday. But I didn’t tell you then, because I didn’t know how it would turn out and I didn’t want to exult in advance over a poor little attempt that might come to nothing. Moreover it was no use speaking of the matter at all unless I told you exactly how it came about,” Nick went on, explaining kindly, copiously. “It was the result of a visit unexpectedly paid me by Gabriel Nash.”
     “That man – the man who spoke to me?” Julia asked, startled into a shuddering memory.
     “He did what he thought would please you, but I dare say it didn’t. You met him in Paris and didn’t like him; so I thought it best to hold my tongue about him.”
     “Do you like him?”
     “Very much.”
     “Great heaven!” Julia ejaculated, almost under her breath.
     “The reason I was annoyed was because, somehow, when you came in, I suddenly had the air of having got out of those visits and shut myself up in town to do something that I had kept from you. And I have been very unhappy till I could explain.”
     “You don’t explain – you can’t explain,” Mrs Dallow declared, turning on her companion eyes which, in spite of her studied stillness, expressed deep excitement. “I knew it – I knew everything; that’s why I came.”
     “It was a sort of second-sight – what they call a brain-wave,” Nick smiled.
     “I felt uneasy, I felt a kind of call; it came suddenly, yesterday. It was irresistible, nothing could have kept me this morning.”
     “That’s very serious, but it’s still more delightful. You mustn’t go away again,” said Nick. “We must stick together – forever and ever.”
     He put his arm round her, but she detached herself as soon as she felt its pressure. She rose quickly, moving away, while, mystified, he sat looking up at her as she had looked a few moments before at him. “I’ve thought it all over; I’ve been thinking of it all day,” she began. “That’s why I didn’t come in.”
     “Don’t think of it too much; it isn’t worth it.”
     “You like it more than anything else. You do – you can’t deny it,” she went on.
     “My dear child, what are you talking about?” Nick asked, gently.
     “That’s what you like – doing what you were this morning; with women lolling, with their things off, to be painted, and people like that man.”
     Nick slowly got up, hesitating. “My dear Julia, apart from the surprise, this morning, do you object to the living model?”
     “Not a bit, for you.”
     “What’s the inconvenience, then, since in my studio they are only for me?”
     “You love it, you revel in it; that’s what you want, and that’s the only thing you want!” Julia broke out.
     “To have models, lolling women, do you mean?”
     “That’s what I felt, what I knew, what came over me and haunted me yesterday, so that I couldn’t throw it off. It seemed to me that if I could see it with my eyes and have the perfect proof I should feel better, I should be quiet. And now I am – after a struggle of some hours, I confess. I have seen; the whole thing’s clear and I’m satisfied.”
     “I’m not, and to me the whole thing isn’t clear. What exactly are you talking about?” Nick demanded.
     “About what you were doing this morning. That’s your innermost preference, that’s your secret passion.”
     “A little go at something serious? Yes, it was almost serious,” said Nick. “But it was an accident, this morning and yesterday: I got on better than I intended.”
     “I’m sure you have immense talent,” Mrs Dallow remarked, with a joylessness that was almost droll.
     “No, no, I might have had. I’ve plucked it up: it’s too late for it to flower. My dear Julia, I’m perfectly incompetent and perfectly resigned.”
     “Yes, you looked so this morning, when you hung over her. Oh, she’ll bring back your talent!”
     “She’s an obliging and even an intelligent creature, and I’ve no doubt she would if she could. But I’ve received from you all the help that any woman is destined to give me. No one can do for me again what you have done.”
     “I shouldn’t try it again; I acted in ignorance. Oh, I’ve thought it all out!” Julia declared. Then, with a strange face of anguish resting on his, she said: “Before it’s too late – before it’s too late!”
     “Too late for what?”
     “For you to be free – for you to be free. And for me – for me to be free too. You hate everything I like!” she exclaimed, with a trembling voice. “Don’t pretend, don’t pretend!” she went on, as a sound of protest broke from him.
     “I thought you wanted me to paint,” protested Nick, flushed and staring.
     “I do – I do. That’s why you must be free, why we must part.”
     “Why we must part?”
     “Oh, I’ve turned it over. I’ve faced the truth. It wouldn’t do at all,” said Mrs Dallow.
     “I like the way you talk of it, as if it were a trimming for your dress!” Nick rejoined, with bitterness. “Won’t it do for you to be loved and cherished as well as any woman in England?”
     Mrs Dallow turned away from him, closing her eyes as if not to see something that would he dangerous to her. “You mustn’t give anything up for me. I should feel it all the while and I should hate it. I’m not afraid of the truth, but you are.”
     “The truth, dear Julia? I only want to know it,” said Nick. “It seems to me I’ve got hold of it. When two persons are united by the tenderest affection and are sane and generous and just, no difficulties that occur in the union their life makes for them are insurmountable, no problems are insoluble.”
     Mrs Dallow appeared for a moment to reflect upon this; it was spoken in a tone that might have touched her. At any rate at the end of the moment, lifting her eyes, she announced: “I hate art, as you call it. I thought I did, I knew I did; but till this morning I didn’t know how much.”
     “Bless your soul, that wasn’t art,” pleaded Nick. “The real thing will be a thousand miles away from us; it will never come into the house, soyez tranquille. Why then should you worry?”
     “Because I want to understand, I want to know what I’m doing. You’re an artist: you are, you are!” Mrs Dallow cried, accusing him passionately.
     “My poor Julia, it isn’t so easy as that, nor a character one can take on from one day to the other. There are all sorts of things; one must be caught young and put through the mill and see things as they are. There would be sacrifices I never can make.”
     “Well then, there are sacrifices for both of us, and I can’t make them either. I dare say it’s all right for you, but for me it would be a terrible mistake. When I think I’m doing something I mustn’t do just the opposite,” Julia went on, as if she wished to explain and be clear. “There are things I’ve thought of, the things I like best; and they are not what you mean. It would be a great deception, and it’s not the way I see my life, and it would be misery if we don’t understand.”
     Nick looked at her in hard perplexity, for she did not succeed in explaining as well as she wished. “If we don’t understand what?”
     “That we are awfully different – that you are doing it all for me.”
     “And is that an objection to me – what I do for you?” asked Nick.
     “You do too much. You’re awfully good, you’re generous, you’re a dear fellow; but I don’t believe in it. I didn’t, at bottom, from the first – that’s why I made you wait, why I gave you your freedom. Oh, I’ve suspected you! I had my ideas. It’s all right for you, but it won’t do for me: I’m different altogether. Why should it always be put upon me, when I hate it? What have I done? I was drenched with it, before.” These last words, as they broke forth, were accompanied, even as the speaker uttered them, with a quick blush; so that Nick could as quickly discern in them the uncalculated betrayal of an old irritation, an old shame almost – her late husband’s flat, inglorious taste for pretty things, his indifference to every chance to play a public part. This had been the mortification of her youth, and it was indeed a perversity of fate that a new alliance should contain for her even an oblique demand for the same spirit of accommodation, impose on her the secret bitterness of the same concessions. As Nick stood there before her, struggling sincerely with the force that he now felt to be strong in her, the intense resolution to break with him, a force matured in a few hours, he read a riddle that hitherto had baffled him, saw a great mystery become simple. A personal passion for him had all but thrown her into his arms (the sort of thing that even a vain man – and Nick was not especially vain – might hesitate to recognize the strength of); held in check, with a tension of the cord at moments of which he could still feel the vibration, by her deep, her rare ambition, and arrested at the last only just in time to save her calculations. His present glimpse of the immense extent of these calculations did not make him think her cold or poor; there was in fact a positive strange heat in them and they struck him rather as grand and high. The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for him – drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he would not after all serve her determination to be associated, so far as a woman could, with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an uncertainty, the satisfaction of a gnawing tenderness and judge for the long run – this exhibition of will and courage, of the large plan that possessed her, commanded his admiration on the spot. He paid the heavy penalty of being a man of imagination; he was capable of far excursions of the spirit, disloyalties to habit and even to faith, and open to wondrous communications. He ached for the moment to convince her that he would achieve what he wouldn’t, for the vision of his future that she had tried to entertain shone before him as a bribe and a challenge. It seemed to him there was nothing he couldn’t fancy enough, to be so fancied by her. Presently he said:
     “You want to be sure the man you marry will be prime minister of England. But how can you be sure, with any one?”
     “I can be sure some men won’t” Mrs Dallow replied.
     “The only safe thing, perhaps, would be to marry Mr Macgeorge,” Nick suggested.
     “Possibly not even him.”
     “You’re a prime minister yourself,” Nick answered. “To hold fast to you as I hold, to be determined to be of your party – isn’t that political enough, since you are the incarnation of politics?”
     “Ah, how you hate them!” Julia moaned. “I saw that when I saw you this morning. The whole place reeked of it.”
     “My dear child, the greatest statesmen have had their distractions. What do you make of my hereditary talent? That’s a tremendous force.”
     “It wouldn’t carry you far.” Then Mrs Dallow added: “You must be a great artist.” Nick gave a laugh at the involuntary contempt of this, but she went on: “It’s beautiful of you to want to give up anything, and I like you for it. I shall always like you. We shall be friends, and I shall always take an interest—”
     He stopped her at this, made a movement which interrupted her phrase, and she suffered him to hold her hand as if she were not afraid of him now. “It isn’t only for you,” he argued gently; “you’re a great deal, but you’re not everything. Innumerable vows and pledges repose upon my head. I’m inextricably committed and dedicated. I was brought up in the temple; my father was a high priest and I’m a child of the Lord. And then the life itself – when you speak of it I feel stirred to my depths: it’s like a herald’s trumpet. Fight with me, Julia – not against me! Be on my side, and we shall do everything. It is fascinating, to be a great man before the people – to be loved by them, to be followed by them. An artist isn’t – never, never. Why should he be? Don’t forget how clever I am.”
     “Oh, if it wasn’t for that!” she rejoined, flushed with the effort to resist his tone. She asked abruptly: “Do you pretend that if I were to die to-morrow you would stay in the House?”
     “If you were to die? God knows! But you do singularly little justice to my incentives,” Nick continued. “My political career is everything to my mother.”
     Julia hesitated a moment; then she inquired: “Are you afraid of your mother?”
     “Yes, particularly; for she represents infinite possibilities of disappointment and distress. She represents all my father’s as well as all her own; and in them my father tragically lives again. On the other hand I see him in bliss, as I see my mother, over our marriage and our life of common aspirations; though of course that’s not a consideration that I can expect to have power with you.”
     Mrs Dallow shook her head slowly, even smiling a little with an air of recovered calmness and lucidity. “You’ll never hold high office.”
     “But why not take me as I am?”
     “Because I’m abominably keen about that sort of thing; I must recognize it. I must face the ugly truth. I’ve been through the worst; it’s all settled.”
     “The worst, I suppose, was when you found me this morning.”
     “Oh, that was all right – for you.”
     “You’re magnanimous, Julia; but evidently what’s good enough for me isn’t good enough for you.” Nick spoke with bitterness.
     “I don’t like you enough – that’s the obstacle,” said Mrs Dallow bravely.
     “You did a year ago; you confessed to it.”
     “Well, a year ago was a year ago. Things are changed to-day.”
     “You’re very fortunate – to be able to throw away a devotion,” Nick replied.
     Julia had her pocket-handkerchief in her hand, and at this she quickly pressed it to her lips, as if to check an exclamation. Then for an instant she appeared to be listening as if for a sound from outside. Nick interpreted her movement as an honourable impulse to repress the words: “Do you mean the devotion that I was witness of this morning?” But immediately afterwards she said something very different: “I thought I heard a ring. I’ve telegraphed for Mrs Gresham.”
     “Why did you do that?” asked Nick.
     “Oh, I want her.”
     He walked to the window, where the curtains had not been drawn, and saw in the dusk a cab at the door. When he turned back he said: “Why won’t you trust me to make you like me, as you call it, better? If I make you like me as well as I like you, it will be about enough, I think.”
     “Oh, I like you enough for your happiness. And I don’t throw away a devotion,” Mrs Dallow continued. “I shall be constantly kind to you. I shall be beautiful to you.”
     “You’ll make me lose a fortune,” declared Nick.
     Julia stared, then she coloured. “Ah, you may have all the money you want.”
     “I don’t mean yours,” he answered, flushing in his turn. He had determined on the instant, since it might serve, to tell her what he had never spoken of to her before. “Mr Carteret last year promised me a pot of money on the day I should stand up with you. He has his heart set on our marriage.”
     “I’m sorry to disappoint Mr Carteret,” said Julia. “I’ll go and see him. I’ll make it all right,” she went on. “Besides, you’ll make a fortune by your portraits. The great men get a thousand, just for a head.”
     “I’m only joking,” Nick returned, with sombre eyes that contradicted this profession. “But what things you deserve I should do!”
     “Do you mean striking likenesses?”
     “You do hate it! Pushed to that point, it’s curious,” the young man audibly mused.
     “Do you mean you’re joking about Mr Carteret’s promise?”
     “No, the promise is real; but I don’t seriously offer it as a reason.”
     “I shall go to Beauclere,” said Mrs Dallow. “You’re an hour late,” she added in a different tone; for at that moment the door of the room was thrown open and Mrs Gresham, the butler pronouncing her name, was ushered in.
     “Ah, don’t impugn my punctuality; it’s my character!” the useful lady exclaimed, putting a sixpence from the cabman into her purse. Nick went off, at this, with a simplified farewell – went off foreseeing exactly what he found the next day, that Mrs Gresham would have received orders not to budge from her hostess’s side. He called on the morrow, late in the afternoon, and Julia saw him liberally, in pursuance of her assertion that she would be ‘beautiful’ to him, that she had not thrown away his devotion; but Mrs Gresham remained immutably a spectator of her liberality. Julia looked at him kindly, but her companion was more benignant still; so that what Nick did with his own eyes was not to appeal to Mrs Dallow to see him for a moment alone, but to solicit, in the name of this luxury, the second occupant of the drawing-room. Mrs Gresham seemed to say, while Julia said very little: “I understand, my poor friend, I know everything (she has told me only her side, but I’m so competent that I know yours too), and I enter into the whole thing deeply. But it would be as much as my place is worth to accommodate you.” Still, she did not go so far as to give him an inkling of what he learned on the third day and what he had not gone so far as to suspect – that the two ladies had made rapid arrangements for a scheme of foreign travel. These arrangements had already been carried out when, at the door of the house in Great Stanhope Street, the fact was imparted to Nick that Mrs Dallow and her friend had started that morning for Paris.

     On their way to Florence, Julia Dallow and Mrs Gresham spent three days in Paris, where Peter Sherringham had as much conversation with his sister as it often befell one member of that family to have with another. That is on two different occasions he enjoyed half an hour’s gossip with her in her sitting-room at the hotel. On one of these occasions he took the liberty of asking her whether or no, definitely, she meant to marry Nick Dormer. Julia expressed to him that she was much obliged for his interest, but that Nick and she were nothing more than relations and good friends. “He wants to marry you, tremendously,” Peter remarked; to which Mrs Dallow simply made answer: “Well, then, he may want!”
     After this they sat silent for some moments, as if the subject had been quite threshed out between them. Peter felt no impulse to penetrate further, for it was not a habit of the Sherringhams to talk with each other of their love-affairs; and he was conscious of the particular deterrent that he and Julia had in general so different a way of feeling that they could never go far together in discussion. He liked her and was sorry for her, thought her life lonely and wondered she didn’t make a ‘great’ marriage. Moreover he pitied her for being without the interests and consolations that he had found substantial: those of the intellectual, the studious order he considered these to be, not knowing how much she supposed that she reflected and studied or what an education she had found in her political aspirations, regarded by him as scarcely more a personal part of her than the livery of her servants or the jewels George Dallow’s money had bought. Her relations with Nick were unfathomable to him; but they were not his affair. No affair of Julia’s was sufficiently his to justify him in an attempt to understand it. That there should have been any question of her marrying Nick was the anomaly to him, rather than that the question should have been dropped. He liked his clever cousin very well as he was – enough to have a vague sense that he might be spoiled by being altered into a brother-in-law. Moreover, though he was not perhaps distinctly conscious of this, Peter pressed lightly on Julia’s doings from a tacit understanding that in this case she would let him off as easily. He could not have said exactly what it was that he judged it pertinent to be let off from: perhaps from irritating inquiry as to whether he had given any more tea-parties for young ladies connected with the theatre.
     Peter’s forbearance however did not bring him all the security he prefigured. After an interval he indeed went so far as to ask Julia if Nick had been wanting in respect to her; but this was a question intended for sympathy, not for control. She answered: “Dear, no – though he’s very provoking.” Thus Peter guessed that they had had a quarrel in which it didn’t concern him to interpose: he added the epithet and her flight from England together and they made up, to his perception, one of the little magnified embroilments which do duty for the real in superficial lives. It was worse to provoke Julia than not, and Peter thought Nick’s doing so not particularly characteristic of his versatility for good. He might wonder why she didn’t marry the member for Harsh if the subject had come up; but he wondered still more why Nick didn’t marry her. Julia said nothing, again, as if to give him a chance to make some inquiry which would save her from gushing; but as his idea appeared to be to change the subject, and as he changed it only by silence, she was reduced to resuming presently:
     “I should have thought you would have come over to see your friend the actress.”
     “Which of my friends? I know so many actresses,” Peter rejoined.
     “The woman you inflicted on us in this place a year ago – the one who is in London now.”
     “Oh, Miriam Rooth! I should have liked to come over, but I’ve been tied fast. Have you seen her?”
     “Yes, I’ve seen her.”
     “Do you like her?”
     “Not at all.”
     “She has a lovely voice,” Peter hazarded, after a moment.
     “I don’t know anything about her voice – I haven’t heard it.”
     “But she doesn’t act in pantomime, does she?”
     “I don’t know anything about her acting. I saw her in private – in Nick Dormer’s studio.”
     “In Nick Dormer’s studio? What was she doing there?”
     “She was sprawling over the room and staring at me.”
     If Mrs Dallow had wished to ‘draw’ her brother it is probable that at this point she suspected she had succeeded, in spite of the care he took to divest his tone of everything like emotion in uttering the words: “Why, does he know her so well? I didn’t know.”
     “She’s sitting to him for her portrait; at least she was then.”
     “Oh, yes, I remember: I put him up to that. I’m greatly interested. Is the portrait good?”
     “I haven’t the least idea – I didn’t look at it. I dare say it’s clever,” Julia added.
     “How in the world does Nick find time to paint?”
     “I don’t know. That horrid man brought her.”
     “What horrid man?” Peter demanded.
     “The one Nick thinks so clever – the vulgar little man who was at your place that day and tried to talk to me. I remember he abused theatrical people to me – as if I cared anything about them. But he has apparently something to do with this girl.”
     “Oh, I recollect him – I had a discussion with him,” Peter said.
     “How could you? I must go and dress,” Julia went on.
     “He was clever, remarkably. Miss Rooth and her mother were old friends of his, and he was the first person to speak of them to me.”
     “What a distinction! I thought him disgusting!” exclaimed Mrs Dallow, who was pressed for time and who had now got up.
     “Oh, you’re severe,” said Peter; but as they separated she had given him something to think of.
     That Nick was painting a beautiful actress was no doubt in part at least the reason why he was provoking and why his most intimate female friend had come abroad. The fact did not render him provoking to Peter Sherringham: on the contrary Peter had been quite sincere when he qualified it as interesting. It became indeed on reflection so interesting that it had perhaps almost as much to do with Sherringham’s rush over to London as it had to do with Julia’s coming away. Reflection taught Peter further that the matter was altogether a delicate one, and suggested that it was odd he should he mixed up with it in fact, when, as Julia’s business, he had wished only to keep out of it. It was his own business a little too: there was somehow a still more pointed implication of that in his sister’s saying to him the next day that she wished immensely he would take a fancy to Biddy Dormer. She said more: she said there had been a time when she believed he had done so – believed too that the poor child herself had believed the same. Biddy was far away the nicest girl she knew – the dearest, sweetest, cleverest, best, and one of the prettiest creatures in England, which never spoiled anything. She would make as charming a wife as ever a man had, suited to any position, however high, and (Julia didn’t mind mentioning it, since Peter would believe it whether she mentioned it or no) was so predisposed in his favour that he would have no trouble at all. In short she herself would see him through – she would answer for it that he would only have to speak. Biddy’s life at home was horrid; she was very sorry for her – the child was worthy of a better fate. Peter wondered what constituted the horridness of Biddy’s life, and perceived that it mainly arose from the fact that Julia disliked Lady Agnes and Grace; profiting comfortably by the freedom to do so conferred upon her by her having given them a house of which she had perhaps not felt the want till they were in possession of it. He knew she had always liked Biddy, but he asked himself (this was the rest of his wonder) why she had taken to liking her so extraordinarily just now. He liked her himself – he even liked to be talked to about her and he could believe everything Julia said: the only thing that mystified him was her motive for suddenly saying it. He assured her that he was infinitely indebted to her for her expenditure of imagination on his behalf, but that he was sorry if he had put it into any one’s head (most of all into the girl’s own) that he had looked at Biddy with a covetous eye. He knew not whether she would make a good wife, but he liked her quite too much to wish to put such a ticklish matter to the test. She was surely not intended for cruel experiments. As it happened he was not thinking of marrying any one – he had ever so many reasons against it. Of course one was never safe against accidents, but one could at least take precautions, and he didn’t mind telling her that there were several he had taken.
     “I don’t know what you mean, but it seems to me quite the best precaution would be to care for a charming, steady girl like Biddy,” Mrs Dallow replied. “Than you would be quite in shelter, you would know the worst that can happen to you, and it wouldn’t be bad.” The objection Peter had made to this argument is not important, especially as it was not remarkably candid; it need only be mentioned that before he and Julia parted she said to him, still in reference to Bridget Dormer: “Do go and see her and be nice to her: she’ll save you disappointments.”
     These last words reverberated in Sherringham’s mind; there was a shade of the portentous in them and they seemed to proceed from a larger knowledge of the subject than he himself as yet possessed. They were not absent from his memory when, in the beginning of May, availing himself, to save time, of the night-service, he crossed from Paris to London. He arrived before the breakfast-hour and went to his sister’s house in Great Stanhope Street, where he always found quarters whether she were in town or not. If she were at home she welcomed him, and if she were not the relaxed servants hailed him for the chance he gave them to recover their ‘form’. In either case his allowance of space was large and his independence complete. He had obtained permission this year to take in fractions instead of as a single draught the leave of absence to which he was entitled; and there was moreover a question of his being transferred to another Embassy, in which event he believed that he might count upon a month or two in England before proceeding to his new post.
     He waited after breakfast but a very few minutes before jumping into a hansom and rattling away to the north. A part of his waiting indeed consisted of a fidgety walk up Bond Street, during which he looked at his watch three or four times while he paused at shop-windows for fear of being a little early. In the cab, as he rolled along, after having given an address – Balaklava Place, St John’s Wood – the fear that he should be too early took curiously at moments the form of a fear that he should be too late: a symbol of the inconsistencies of which his spirit at present was full. Peter Sherringham was nervous, too nervous for a diplomatist, and haunted with inclinations, and indeed with purposes, which contradicted each other. He wanted to be out of it and yet he dreaded not to be in it, and on this particular occasion the sense of exclusion made him sore. At the same time he was not unconscious of the impulse to stop his cab and make it turn round and drive due south. He saw himself launched in the breezy fact while, morally speaking, he was hauled up on the hot sand of the principle, and he had the intelligence to perceive how little these two faces of the same idea had in common. However, as the sense of movement encouraged him to reflect, a principle was a poor affair if it remained mere inaction. Yet from the moment it turned to action it manifestly could only be the particular action in which he was engaged; so that he was in the absurd position of thinking his behaviour more consummate for the reason that it was directly opposed to his intentions.
     He had kept away from London ever since Miriam Rooth came over; resisting curiosity, sympathy, importunate haunting passion and considering that his resistance, founded, to be salutary, on a general scheme of life, was the greatest success he had yet achieved. He was deeply occupied with plucking up the feeling that attached him to her, and he had already, by various little ingenuities, loosened some of its roots. He suffered her to make her first appearance on any stage without the comfort of his voice or the applause of his hand; saying to himself that the man who could do the more could do the less and that such an act of fortitude was a proof he should keep straight. It was not exactly keeping straight to run over to London three months later and, the hour he arrived, scramble off to Balaklava Place; but after all he pretended only to be human and aimed in behaviour only at the heroic, not at the monstrous. The highest heroism was three parts tact. He had not written to Miriam that he was coming to England and would call upon her at eleven o’clock in the morning, because it was his secret pride that he had ceased to correspond with her. Sherringham took his prudence where he could find it, and in doing so was rather like a drunkard who should flatter himself that he had forsworn liquor because he didn’t touch lemonade.
     It is an example of how much he was drawn in different directions at once that when, on reaching Balaklava Place and alighting at the door of a small much-ivied house which resembled a gate-lodge bereft of its park, he learned that Miss Rooth had only a quarter of an hour before quitted the spot with her mother (they had gone to the theatre, to rehearsal, said the maid who answered the bell he had set tinkling behind a dingy plastered wall): when at the end of his pilgrimage he was greeted by a disappointment he suddenly found himself relieved and for the moment even saved. Providence was after all taking care of him and he submitted to Providence. He would still be watched over doubtless, even if he should follow the two ladies to the theatre, send in his card and obtain admission to the histrionic workshop. All his old technical interest in the girl’s development flamed up again, and he wondered what she was rehearsing, what she was to do next. He got back into his hansom and drove down the Edgware Road. By the time he reached the Marble Arch he had changed his mind again – he had determined to let Miriam alone for that day. The day would be over at eight o’clock in the evening (he hardly played fair), and then he should consider himself free. Instead of going to the theatre he drove to a shop in Bond Street, to take a place for the play. On first coming out he had tried, at one of those establishments strangely denominated ‘libraries’, to get a stall, but the people to whom he applied were unable to accommodate him – they had not a single seat left. His second attempt, at another ‘library’, was more successful: he was unable to obtain a stall, but by a miracle he might have a box. There was a certain wantonness in paying for a box to see a play on which he had already expended four hundred pounds; but while he was mentally measuring this abyss an idea came into his head which flushed the extravagance with a slight rose-tint.
     Peter came out of the shop with the voucher for the box in his pocket, turned into Piccadilly, noted that the day was growing warm and fine, felt glad that this time he had no business, unless it were business to leave a card or two on official people, and asked himself where he should go if he didn’t go after Miriam. Then it was that it struck him as most acutely desirable, and even most important, that he should see Nick Dormer’s portrait of her. He wondered which would be the natural place at that hour of the day to look for the artist. The House of Commons was perhaps the nearest one, but Nick, incongruous as his proceedings certainly were, probably didn’t keep the picture there; and moreover it was not generally characteristic of him to be in the natural place. The end of Peter’s debate was that he again entered a hansom and drove to Calcutta Gardens. The hour was early for calling, but cousins with whom one’s intercourse was mainly a conversational scuffle would accept it as a practical illustration of that method. And if Julia wanted him to be nice to Biddy (which was exactly, though with a different view, what he wanted himself), what could be nicer than to pay his visit to Lady Agnes (he would have in decency to go to see her some time) at a friendly, fraternizing hour, when they would all be likely to be at home?
     Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were not at home, so that Peter had to fall back on neutrality and the butler, who was however, more luckily, an old friend. Her ladyship and Miss Dormer were absent from town, paying a visit; and Mr Dormer was also away, or was on the point of going away for the day. Miss Bridget was in London, but was out: Peter’s informant mentioned with earnest vagueness that he thought she had gone somewhere to take a lesson. On Peter’s asking what sort of a lesson he meant, he replied, “Oh, I think the a-sculpture, you know, sir.” Peter knew, but Biddy’s lesson in a-sculpture (it sounded on the butler’s lips like a fashionable new art) struck him a little as a mockery of the benevolent spirit in which he had come to look her up. The man had an air of participating respectfully in his disappointment and, to make up for it, added that he might perhaps find Mr Dormer at his other address. He had gone out early and had directed his servant to come to Rosedale Road in an hour or two with a portmanteau: he was going down to Beauclere in the course of the day, Mr Carteret being ill – perhaps Mr Sherringham didn’t know it. Perhaps too Mr Sherringham would catch him in Rosedale Road before he took his train – he was to have been busy there for an hour. This was worth trying, and Peter immediately drove to Rosedale Road; where, in answer to his ring, the door was opened to him by Biddy Dormer.

     When Biddy saw him her cheek exhibited the prettiest pleased, surprised red that he had ever observed there, though he was not unacquainted with its fluctuations, and she stood still, smiling at him with the outer dazzle in her eyes, making no motion for him to enter. She only said: “Oh, Peter!” And then: “I’m all alone.”
     “So much the better, dear Biddy. Is that any reason I shouldn’t come in?”
     “Dear, no – do come in. You’ve just missed Nick; he has gone to the country – half an hour ago.” She had on a large apron, and in her hand she carried a small stick, besmeared, as his quick eye saw, with modelling-clay. She dropped the door and fled back before him into the studio, where, when he followed her, she was in the act of flinging a cloth over a rough head, in clay, which, in the middle of the room, was supported on a high wooden stand. The effort to hide what she had been doing before he caught a glimpse of it made her redder still and led to her smiling more, to her laughing with a charming confusion of shyness and gladness. She rubbed her hands on her apron, she pulled it off, she looked delightfully awkward, not meeting Peter’s eye, and she said: “I’m just scraping here a little – you mustn’t mind me. What I do is awful, you know. Peter, please don’t look. I’ve been coming here lately to make my little mess, because mamma doesn’t particularly like it at home. I’ve had a lesson from a lady who exhibits; but you wouldn’t suppose it, to see what I do. Nick’s so kind; he lets me come here; he uses the studio so little; I do what I please. What a pity he’s gone – he would have been so glad. I’m really alone – I hope you don’t mind. Peter, please don’t look.”
     Peter was not bent upon looking; his eyes had occupation enough in Biddy’s own agreeable aspect, which was full of an unusual element of domestication and responsibility. Though she had taken possession, by exception, of her brother’s quarters, she struck her visitor as more at home and more herself than he had ever seen her. It was the first time she had been to his vision so separate from her mother and sister. She seemed to know this herself and to be a little frightened by it – just enough to make him wish to be reassuring. At the same time Peter also on this occasion found himself touched with diffidence, especially after he had gone back and closed the door and settled down to a regular visit; for he became acutely conscious of what Julia had said to him in Paris and was unable to rid himself of the suspicion that it had been said with Biddy’s knowledge. It was not that he supposed his sister had told the girl that she meant to do what she could to make him propose to her: that would have been cruel to her (if she liked him enough to consent), in Julia’s uncertainty. But Biddy participated by imagination, by divination, by a clever girl’s secret tremulous instincts, in her good friend’s views about her, and this probability constituted for Sherringham a sort of embarrassing publicity. He had impressions, possibly gross and unjust, in regard to the way women move constantly together amid such considerations and subtly intercommunicate, when they do not still more subtly dissemble, the hopes or fears of which persons of the opposite sex form the subject. Therefore poor Biddy would know that if she failed to strike him in the right light it would not be for want of his attention’s having been called to her claims. She would have been tacitly rejected, virtually condemned. Peter could not, without a slight sense of fatuity, endeavour to make up for this to her by kindness; he was aware that if any one knew it a man would be ridiculous who should take so much as that for granted. But no one would know it: oddly enough, in this calculation of security he left Biddy herself out. It did not occur to him that she might have a secret small irony to spare for his ingenious and magnanimous impulse to show her how much he liked her in order to make her forgive him for not liking her more. This magnanimity at any rate coloured the whole of Sherringham’s visit to Rosedale Road, the whole of the pleasant, prolonged chat that kept him there for more than an hour. He begged the girl to go on with her work and not to let him interrupt it; and she obliged him at last, taking the cloth off the lump of clay and giving him a chance to be delightful by guessing that the shapeless mass was intended, or would be intended after a while, for Nick. He saw that she was more comfortable when she began to smooth it and scrape it with her little stick again, to manipulate it with an ineffectual air of knowing how; for this gave her something to do, relieved her nervousness and permitted her to turn away from him when she talked.
     Peter walked about the room and sat down; got up and looked at Nick’s things; watched her at moments in silence (which made her always say in a minute that he was not to look at her so or she could do nothing); observed how her position, before her high stand, her lifted arms, her turns of the head, considering her work this way and that, all helped her to be pretty. She repeated again and again that it was an immense pity about Nick, till he was obliged to say he didn’t care a straw for Nick: he was perfectly content with the company he found. This was not the sort of thing he thought it right, under the circumstances, to say; but then even the circumstances did not require him to pretend he liked her less than he did. After all she was his cousin; she would cease to be so if she should become his wife; but one advantage of her not entering into that relation was precisely that she would remain his cousin. It was very pleasant to find a young, bright, slim, rose-coloured kinswoman all ready to recognize consanguinity when one came back from cousinless foreign lands. Peter talked about family matters; he didn’t know, in his exile, where no one took an interest in them, what a fund of latent curiosity about them was in him. It was in him to gossip about them and to enjoy the sense that he and Biddy had indefeasible properties in common – ever so many things as to which they would understand each other à demi-mot. He smoked a cigarette, because she begged him to, said that people always smoked in studios – it made her feel so much more like an artist. She apologized for the badness of her work on the ground that Nick was so busy he could scarcely ever give her a sitting; so that she had to do the head from photographs and occasional glimpses. They had hoped to be able to put in an hour that morning, but news had suddenly come that Mr Carteret was worse, and Nick had hurried down to Beauclere. Mr Carteret was very ill, poor old dear, and Nick and he were immense friends. Nick had always been charming to him. Peter and Biddy took the concerns of the houses of Dormer and Sherringham in order, and the young man felt after a little as if they were as wise as a French conseil de famille, settling what was best for everyone. He heard all about Lady Agnes and manifested an interest in the detail of her existence that he had not supposed himself to possess, though indeed Biddy threw out intimations which excited his curiosity, presenting her mother in a light that might call upon his sympathy.
     “I don’t think she has been very happy or very pleased, of late,” the girl said. “I think she has had some disappointments, poor dear mamma; and Grace has made her go out of town for three or four days, for a little change. They have gone down to see an old lady, Lady St Dunstans, who never comes to London now, and who, you know – she’s tremendously old – was papa’s godmother. It’s not very lively for Grace, but Grace is such a dear she’ll do anything for mamma. Mamma will go anywhere to see people she can talk with about papa.”
     Biddy added, in reply to a further inquiry from Peter, that what her mother was disappointed about was – well, themselves, her children and all their affairs; and she explained that Lady Agnes wanted all kinds of things for them that didn’t come to them, that they didn’t get or seem likely to get, so that their life appeared altogether a failure. She wanted a great deal, Biddy admitted; she really wanted everything and she had thought in her happier days that everything was to be hers. She loved them all so much, and then she was proud: she couldn’t get over the thought of their not being successful. Sherringham was unwilling to press, at this point, for he suspected one of the things that Lady Agnes wanted; but Biddy relieved him a little by saying that one of these things was that Grace should get married.
     “That’s too unselfish of her,” rejoined Peter, who didn’t care for Grace. “Cousin Agnes ought to keep her near her always, if Grace is so obliging and devoted.”
     “Oh, mamma would give up anything of that sort for our good; she wouldn’t sacrifice us that way!” Biddy exclaimed. “Besides, I’m the one to stay with mamma; not that I can manage and look after her and do everything so well as Grace. But, you know, I want to,” said Biddy, with a liquid note in her voice, giving her lump of clay a little stab.
     “But doesn’t your mother want the rest of you to get married – Percival and Nick and you?” Peter asked.
     “Oh, she has given up Percy. I don’t suppose she thinks it would do. Dear Nick, of course – that’s just what she does want.”
     Sherringham hesitated. “And you, Biddy?”
     “Oh, I dare say; but that doesn’t signify – I never shall.”
     Peter got up, at this; the tone of it set him in motion and he took a turn round the room. He said something to her about her being too proud; to which she replied that that was the only thing for a girl to be, to get on.
     “What do you mean by getting on?” Peter demanded, stopping, with his hands in his pockets, on the other side of the studio.
     “I mean crying one’s eyes out!” Biddy unexpectedly exclaimed; but she drowned the effect of this pathetic paradox in a foolish laugh and in the quick declaration: “Of course it’s about Nick that poor mother’s really broken-hearted.”
     “What’s the matter with Nick?” Sherringham asked, diplomatically.
     “Oh, Peter, what’s the matter with Julia?” Biddy quavered softly, back to him, with eyes suddenly frank and mournful. “I dare say you know what we all hoped – what we all supposed, from what they told us. And now they won’t!” said Biddy.
     “Yes, Biddy, I know. I had the brightest prospect of becoming your brother-in-law: wouldn’t that have been it – or something like that? But it is indeed visibly clouded. What’s the matter with them? May I have another cigarette?” Peter came back to the wide, cushioned bench where he had been lounging: this was the way they took up the subject he wanted most to look into. “Don’t they know how to love?” he went on, as he seated himself again.
     “It seems a kind of fatality!” sighed Biddy.
     Peter said nothing for some moments, at the end of which he inquired whether his companion were to be quite alone during her mother’s absence. She replied that her mother was very droll about that – she would never leave her alone: she thought something dreadful would happen to her. She had therefore arranged that Florence Tressilian should come and stay in Calcutta Gardens for the next few days, to look after her and see she did no wrong. Peter asked who Florence Tressilian might be: he greatly hoped, for or the success of Lady Agnes’s precautions, that she was not a flighty young genius like Biddy. She was described to him as tremendously nice and tremendously clever, but also tremendously old and tremendously safe; with the addition that Biddy was tremendously fond of her and that while she remained in Calcutta Gardens they expected to enjoy themselves tremendously. She was to come that afternoon, before dinner.
     “And are you to dine at home?” said Peter.
     “Certainly; where else?”
     “And just you two, alone? Do you call that enjoying yourselves tremendously?”
     “It will do for me. No doubt I oughtn’t, in modesty, to speak for poor Florence.”
     “It isn’t fair to her; you ought to invite some one to meet her.”
     “Do you mean you, Peter?” the girl asked, turning to him quickly, with a look that vanished the instant he caught it.
     “Try me; I’ll come like a shot.”
     “That’s kind,” said Biddy, dropping her hands and now resting her eyes on him gratefully. She remained in this position a moment, as if she were under a charm; then she jerked herself back to her work with the remark: “Florence will like that immensely.”
     “I’m delighted to please Florence, your description of her is so attractive!” Sherringham laughed. And when the girl asked him if he minded if there were not a great feast, because when her mother went away she allowed her a fixed amount for that sort of thing and, as he might imagine, it wasn’t millions – when Biddy, with the frankness of their pleasant kinship, touched anxiously on this economical point (illustrating, as Peter saw, the lucidity with which Lady Agnes had had in her old age to learn to recognize the occasions when she could be conveniently frugal), he answered that the shortest dinners were the best, especially when one was going to the theatre. That was his case to-night, and did Biddy think he might look to Miss Tressilian to go with him? They would have to dine early; he wanted not to miss a moment.
     “The theatre – Miss Tressilian?” Biddy stared, interrupted and in suspense again.
     “Would it incommode you very much to dine say at 7.15 and accept a place in my box? The finger of Providence was in it when I took a box an hour ago. I particularly like your being free to go – if you are free.”
     Biddy became fairly incoherent with pleasure. “Dear Peter, how good you are! They’ll have it at any hour. Florence will be so glad.”
     “And has Florence seen Miss Rooth?”
     “Miss Rooth?” the girl repeated, redder than before. He perceived in a moment that she had heard that he had devoted much time and attention to that young lady. It was as if she were conscious that he would be conscious in speaking of her, and there was a sweetness in her allowance for him on that score. But Biddy was more confused for him than he was for himself. He guessed in a moment how much she had thought over what she had heard; this was indicated by her saying vaguely: “No, no, I’ve not seen her.” Then she became aware that she was answering a question he had not asked her, and she went on: “We shall be too delighted. I saw her – perhaps you remember – in your rooms in Paris. I thought her so wonderful then! Every one is talking of her here. But we don’t go to the theatre much, you know: we don’t have boxes offered us except when you come. Poor Nick is too much taken up in the evening. I’ve wanted awfully to see her. They say she’s magnificent.”
     “I don’t know,” said Peter. “I haven’t seen her.”
     “You haven’t seen her?”
     “Never, Biddy. I mean on the stage. In private, often – yes,” Sherringham added, conscientiously.
     “Oh!” Biddy exclaimed, bending her face on Nick’s bust again. She asked him no question about the new star, and he offered her no further information. There were things in his mind that pulled him different ways, so that for some minutes silence was the result of the conflict. At last he said, after an hesitation caused by the possibility that she was ignorant of the fact he had lately elicited from Julia, though it was more probable she might have learned it from the same source:
     “Am I perhaps indiscreet in alluding to the circumstance that Nick has been painting Miss Rooth’s portrait?”
     “You are not indiscreet in alluding to it to me, because I know it.”
     “Then there’s no secret nor mystery about it?”
     Biddy considered a moment. “I don’t think mamma knows it.”
     “You mean you have been keeping it from her because she wouldn’t like it?”
     “We’re afraid she may think papa wouldn’t have liked it.”
     This was said with an absence of humour which for an instant moved Sherringham to mirth; but he quickly recovered himself, repenting of any apparent failure of respect to the high memory of his late celebrated relative. He rejoined quickly, but rather vaguely: “Ah, yes, I remember that great man’s ideas;” and then he went on: “May I ask if you know it, the fact that we are talking of, through Julia or through Nick?”
     “I know it from both of them.”
     “Then, if you’re in their confidence, may I further ask whether this undertaking of Nick’s is the reason why things seem to be at an end between them?”
     “Oh, I don’t think she likes it,” returned Biddy.
     “Isn’t it good?”
     “Oh, I don’t mean the picture – she hasn’t seen it; but his having done it.”
     “Does she dislike it so much that that’s why she won’t marry him?”
     Biddy gave up her work, moving away from it to look at it. She came and sat down on the long bench on which Sherringham had placed himself. Then she broke out: “Oh, Peter, it’s a great trouble – it’s a very great trouble; and I can’t tell you, for I don’t understand it.”
     “If I ask you, it’s not to pry into what doesn’t concern me; but Julia is my sister, and I can’t, after all, help taking some interest in her life. But she tells me very little. She doesn’t think me worthy.”
     “Ah, poor Julia!” Biddy murmured, defensively. Her tone recalled to him that Julia had thought him worthy to unite himself to Bridget Dormer, and inevitably betrayed that the girl was thinking of that also. While they both thought of it they sat looking into each other’s eyes.
     “Nick, I’m sure, doesn’t treat you that way. I’m sure he confides in you; he talks to you about his occupations, his ambitions,” Peter continued. “And you understand him, you enter into them, you are nice to him, you help him.”
     “Oh, Nick’s life – it’s very dear to me,” said Biddy.
     “That must be jolly for him.”
     “It makes me very happy.”
     Peter uttered a low, ambiguous groan; then he exclaimed, with irritation: “What the deuce is the matter with them then? Why can’t they hit it off and be quiet and rational and do what every one wants them to do?”
     “Oh, Peter, it’s awfully complicated,” said Biddy, with sagacity.
     “Do you mean that Nick’s in love with her?”
     “In love with Julia?”
     “No, no, with Miriam Rooth.”
     Biddy shook her head slowly; then with a smile which struck him as one of the sweetest things he had ever seen (it conveyed, at the expense of her own prospects, such a shy, generous little mercy of reassurance): “He isn’t, Peter,” she declared. “Julia thinks it’s trifling – all that sort of thing,” she added. “She wants him to go in for different honours.”
     “Julia’s the oddest woman. I thought she loved him,” Sherringham remarked. “And when you love a person—” He continued to reflect, leaving his sentence impatiently unfinished, while Biddy, with lowered eyes, sat waiting (it interested her) to learn what you did when you loved a person. “I can’t conceive her giving him up. He has great ability, besides being such a good fellow.”
     “It’s for his happiness, Peter – that’s the way she reasons,” Biddy explained. “She does it for an idea; she has told me a great deal about it, and I can see the way she feels.”
     “You try to, Biddy, because you are such a dear good-natured girl, but I don’t believe you do in the least. It’s too little the way you yourself would feel. Julia’s idea, as you call it, must be curious.”
     “Well, it is, Peter,” Biddy mournfully admitted. “She won’t risk not coming out at the top.”
     “At the top of what?”
     “Oh, of everything.” Biddy’s tone showed a trace of awe of such high views.
     “Surely one’s at the top of everything when one’s in love.”
     “I don’t know,” said the girl.
     “Do you doubt it?” Sherringham demanded.
     “I’ve never been in love and I never shall be.”
     “You’re as perverse in your way as Julia. But I confess I don’t understand Nick’s attitude any better. He seems to me, if I may say so, neither fish nor flesh.”
     “Oh, his attitude is very noble, Peter; his state of mind is wonderfully interesting,” Biddy pleaded. “Surely you must be in favour of art,” she said.
     Sherringham looked at her a moment. “Dear Biddy, your little digs are as soft as zephyrs.”
     She coloured, but she protested. “My little digs? What do you mean? Are you not in favour of art?”
     The question is delightfully simple. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everything has its place. A parliamentary life scarcely seems to me the situation for portrait-painting.”
     “That’s just what Nick says.”
     “You talk of it together a great deal?”
     “Yes, Nick’s very good to me.”
     “Clever Nick! And what do you advise him?”
     “Oh, to do something.”
     “That’s valuable,” Peter laughed. “Not to give up his sweetheart for the sake of a paint-pot, I hope?”
     “Never, never, Peter! It’s not a question of his giving up, for Julia has herself drawn back. I think she never really felt safe; she loved him, but she was afraid of him. Now she’s only afraid – she has lost the confidence she tried to have. Nick has tried to hold her, but she has jerked herself away. Do you know what she said to me? She said: ‘My confidence has gone forever.’”
     “I didn’t know she was such a prig!” Sherringham exclaimed. “They’re queer people, verily, with water in their veins instead of blood. You and I wouldn’t be like that, should we? though you have taken up such a discouraging position about caring for a fellow.”
     “I care for art,” poor Biddy returned.
     “You do, to some purpose,” said Peter, glancing at the bust.
     “To that of making you laugh at me.”
     “Would you give a good man up for that?”
     “A good man? What man?”
     “Well, say me – if I wanted to marry you.”
     Biddy hesitated a little. “Of course I would, in a moment. At any rate, I’d give up the House of Commons. That’s what Nick’s going to do now – only you mustn’t tell any one.”
     Sherringham stared. “He’s going to chuck up his seat?”
     “I think his mind is made up to it. He has talked me over – we have had some deep discussions. Yes, I’m on the side of art!” said Biddy, ardently.
     “Do you mean in order to paint – to paint Miss Rooth?” Peter went on.
     “To paint every one – that’s what he wants. By keeping his seat he hasn’t kept Julia, and she was the thing he cared most for, in public life. When he has got out of the whole thing his attitude, as he says, will be at least clear. He’s tremendously interesting about it, Peter; he has talked to me wonderfully; he has won me over. Mamma’s heart-broken; telling her will be the hardest part.”
     “If she doesn’t know, why is she heart-broken?”
     “Oh, at the marriage not coming off – she knows that. That’s what she wanted. She thought it perfection. She blames Nick fearfully. She thinks he held the whole thing in his hand and that he has thrown away a magnificent opportunity.”
     “And what does Nick say to her?”
     “He says, ‘Dear old mummy!’”
     “That’s good,” said Sherringham.
     “I don’t know what will become of her when this other blow arrives,” Biddy pursued. “Poor Nick wants to please her – he does, he does. But, as he says, you can’t please everyone, and you must, before you die, please yourself a little.”
     Peter Sherringham sat looking at the floor; the colour had risen to his face while he listened to the girl. Then he sprang up and took another turn about the room. His companion’s artless but vivid recital had set his blood in motion. He had taken Nick Dormer’s political prospects very much for granted, thought of them as definite and brilliant and seductive. To learn there was something for which he was ready to renounce such honours, and to recognize the nature of that bribe, affected Sherringham powerfully and strangely. He felt as if he had heard the sudden blare of a trumpet, and he felt at the same time as if he had received a sudden slap in the face. Nick’s bribe was ‘art’ – the strange temptress with whom he himself had been wrestling and over whom he had finally ventured to believe that wisdom and training had won a victory. There was something in the conduct of his old friend and playfellow that made all his reasonings small. Nick’s unexpected choice acted on him as a reproach and a challenge. He felt ashamed at having placed himself so unromantically on his guard, rapidly saying to himself that if Nick could afford to allow so much for ‘art’ he might surely exhibit some of the same confidence. There had never been the least avowed competition between the cousins – their lines lay too far apart for that; but nevertheless they rode in sight of each other, and Sherringham had at present the sensation of suddenly seeing Nick Dormer give his horse the spur, bound forward and fly over a wall. He was put on his mettle and he had not to look long to spy an obstacle that he too might ride at. High rose his curiosity to see what warrant his kinsman might have for such risks – how he was mounted for such exploits. He really knew little about Nick’s talent – so little as to feel no right to exclaim “What an ass!” when Biddy gave him the news which only the existence of real talent could redeem from absurdity. All his eagerness to ascertain what Nick had been able to make of such a subject as Miriam Rooth came back to him; though it was what mainly had brought him to Rosedale Road he had forgotten it in the happy accident of his encounter with Biddy. He was conscious that if the surprise of a revelation of power were in store for him Nick would be justified more than he himself would feel reinstated in his self-respect. For the courage of renouncing the forum for the studio hovered before him as greater than the courage of marrying an actress whom one was in love with: the reward in the latter case was so much more immediate. Peter asked Biddy what Nick had done with his portrait of Miriam. He hadn’t seen it anywhere in rummaging about the room.
     “I think it’s here somewhere, but I don’t know,” Biddy replied, getting up and looking vaguely round her.
     “Haven’t you seen it? Hasn’t he shown it to you?”
     The girl rested her eyes on him strangely a moment; then she turned them away from him with a mechanical air of seeking for the picture. “I think it’s in the room, put away with its face to the wall.”
     “One of those dozen canvases with their backs to us?
     “One of those perhaps.”
     “Haven’t you tried to see?”
     “I haven’t touched them,” said Biddy, colouring.
     “Hasn’t Nick had it out to show you?”
     “He says it’s in too bad a state – it isn’t finished – it won’t do.”
     “And haven’t you had the curiosity to turn it round for yourself?”
     The embarrassed look in poor Biddy’s face deepened, and it seemed to Sherringham that her eyes pleaded with him a moment, that there was a menace of tears in them, a gleam of anguish. “I’ve had an idea he wouldn’t like it.”
     Her visitor’s own desire however had become too lively for easy forbearance. He laid his hand on two or three canvases which proved, as he extricated them, to be either blank or covered with rudimentary forms. “Dear Biddy, are you as docile, as obliging as that?” he asked, pulling out something else.
     The inquiry was meant in familiar kindness, for Peter was struck, even to admiration, with the girl’s having a sense of honour which all girls have not. She must in this particular case have longed for a sight of Nick’s work – the work which had brought about such a crisis in his life. But she had passed hours in his studio alone, without permitting herself a stolen peep; she was capable of that if she believed it would please him. Sherringham liked a charming girl’s being capable of that (he had known charming girls who would not have been), and his question was really an expression of respect. Biddy, however, apparently discovered some light mockery in it, and she broke out incongruously:
     “I haven’t wanted so much to see it. I don’t care for her as much as that.”
     “So much as that?”
     “I don’t care for his actress – for that vulgar creature. I don’t like her!” said Biddy. unexpectedly.
     Peter stared. “I thought you hadn’t seen her.”
     “I saw her in Paris – twice. She was wonderfully clever, but she didn’t charm me.”
     Sherringham quickly considered, and then he said benevolently: “I won’t inflict the picture upon you then; we’ll leave it alone for the present.” Biddy made no reply to this at first, but after a moment she went straight over to the row of stacked canvases and exposed several of them to the light. “Why did you say you wished to go to the theatre to-night?” her companion continued.
     Still the girl was silent; then she exclaimed, with her back turned to him and a little tremor in her voice, while she drew forth one of her brother’s studies after the other: “For the sake of your company, Peter! Here it is, I think,” she added, moving a large canvas with some effort. “No, no, I’ll hold it for you. Is that the light?”
     She wouldn’t let him take it; she bade him stand off and allow her to place it in the right position. In this position she carefully presented it, supporting it, at the proper angle, from behind and showing her head and shoulders above it. From the moment his eyes rested on the picture Sherringham accepted this service without protest. Unfinished, simplified and in some portions merely suggested, it was strong, brilliant and vivid and had already the look of life and the air of an original thing. Sherringham was startled, he was strangely affected – he had no idea Nick moved with that stride. Miriam was represented in three-quarters, seated, almost down to her feet. She leaned forward, with one of her legs crossed over the other, her arms extended and foreshortened, her hands locked together round her knee. Her beautiful head was bent a little, broodingly, and her splendid face seemed to look down at life. She had a grand appearance of being raised aloft, with a wide regard, from a height of intelligence, for the great field of the artist, all the figures and passions he may represent. Peter wondered where his kinsman had learned to paint like that. He almost gasped at the composition of the thing, at the drawing of the moulded arms. Biddy Dormer abstained from looking round the corner of the canvas as she held it; she only watched, in Peter’s eyes, for his impression of it. This she easily caught, and he could see that she had done so when after a few minutes he went to relieve her. She let him lift the thing out of her grasp; he moved it and rested it, so that they could still see it, against the high back of a chair. “It’s tremendously good,” he said.
     “Dear, dear Nick,” Biddy murmured, looking at it now.
     “Poor, poor Julia!” Sherringham was prompted to exclaim, in a different tone. His companion made no rejoinder to this, and they stood another minute or two side by side in silence, gazing at the portrait. Then Sherringham took up his hat – he had no more time, he must go. “Will you come to-night, all the same?” he asked, with a laugh that was somewhat awkward, putting out his hand to Biddy.
     “All the same?”
     “Why, you say she’s a terrible creature,” Peter went on, with his eyes on the painted face.
     “Oh, anything for art!” said Biddy, smiling.
     “Well, at seven o’clock then.” And Sherringham went away immediately, leaving the girl alone with the Tragic Muse and feeling again, with a quickened rush, a sense of the beauty of Miriam, as well as a new comprehension of the talent of Nick.

     It was not till noon, or rather later, the next day, that Sherringham saw Miriam Rooth. He wrote her a note that evening, to be delivered to her at the theatre, and during the performance she sent round to him a card with “All right – come to luncheon to-morrow,” scrawled upon it in pencil.
     When he presented himself in Balaklava Place he learned that the two ladies had not come in – they had gone again, early, to rehearsal; but they had left word that he was to be pleased to wait – they would come in from one moment to the other. It was further mentioned to him, as he was ushered into the drawing-room, that Mr Dashwood was on the ground. This circumstance however Sherringham barely noted: he had been soaring so high for the past twelve hours that he had almost lost consciousness of the minor differences of earthly things. He had taken Biddy Dormer and her friend Miss Tressilian home from the play, and after leaving them he had walked about the streets, he had roamed back to his sister’s house, in a state of exaltation intensified by the fact that all the evening he had contained himself, thinking it more decorous and considerate, less invidious not to ‘rave’. Sitting there in the shade of the box with his companions, he had watched Miriam in attentive but inexpressive silence, glowing and vibrating inwardly, but, for these fine, deep reasons, not committing himself to the spoken rapture. Delicacy, it appeared to him, should rule the hour; and indeed he had never had a pleasure more delicate than this little period of still observation and repressed ecstasy. Miriam’s art lost nothing by it, and Biddy’s mild nearness only gained. This young lady was silent also – wonderingly dauntedly, as if she too were conscious in relation to the actress of various other things beside her mastery of her art. To this mastery Biddy’s attitude was a candid and liberal tribute: the poor girl sat quenched and pale, as if in the blinding light of a comparison by which it would be presumptuous even to be annihilated. Her subjection however was a gratified, a charmed subjection: there was a beneficence in such beauty – the beauty of the figure that moved before the footlights and spoke in music – even if it deprived one of hope. Peter didn’t say to her, in vulgar elation and in reference to her whimsical profession of dislike at the studio: “Well, do you find this performer so disagreeable now?” and she was grateful to him for his forbearance, for the tacit kindness of which the idea seemed to be: “My poor child, I would prefer you if I could; but – judge for yourself – how can I? Expect of me only the possible. Expect that certainly, but only that.” In the same degree Peter liked Biddy’s sweet, hushed air of judging for herself, of recognizing his discretion and letting him off, while she was lost in the illusion, in the convincing picture of the stage. Miss Tressilian did most of the criticism: she broke out cheerfully and sonorously from time to time, in reference to the actress: “Most striking, certainly,” or, “She is clever, isn’t she?” It was a manner to which her companions found it impossible to respond. Miss Tressilian was disappointed in nothing but their enjoyment: they didn’t seem to think the exhibition as amusing as she.
     Walking away through the ordered void of Lady Agnes’s quarter, with the four acts of the play glowing again before him in the smokeless London night, Sherringham found the liveliest thing in his impression the certitude that if he had never seen Miriam before and she had had for him none of the advantages of association, he would still have recognized in her performance the most interesting thing that the theatre had ever offered him. He floated in a sense of the felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a thing perfectly done, in the almost aggressive bravery of still larger claims for an art which could so triumphantly, so exquisitely render life. “Render it?” Peter said to himself. “Create it and reveal it, rather; give us something new and large and of the first order!” He had seen Miriam now; he had never seen her before; he had never seen her till he saw her in her conditions. Oh, her conditions – there were many things to be said about them; they were paltry enough as yet, inferior, inadequate, obstructive, as compared with the right, full, finished setting of such a talent; but the essence of them was now irremovably in Sherringham’s eye, the vision of how the uplifted stage and the listening house transformed her. That idea of her having no character of her own came back to him with a force that made him laugh in the empty street: this was a disadvantage she was so exempt from that he appeared to himself not to have known her till to-night. Her character was simply to hold you by the particular spell; any other – the good-nature of home, the relation to her mother, her friends, her lovers, her debts, the practice of virtues or industries or vices – was not worth speaking of. These things were the fictions and shadows; the representation was the deep substance.
     Sherringham had, as he went, an intense vision (he had often had it before) of the conditions which were still absent, the great and complete ones, those which would give the girl’s talent a superior, glorious stage. More than ever he desired them, mentally invoked them, filled them out in imagination, cheated himself with the idea that they were possible. He saw them in a momentary illusion and confusion: a great academic, artistic theatre, subsidized and unburdened with money-getting, rich in its repertory, rich in the high quality and the wide array of its servants, and above all in the authority of an impossible administrator – a manager personally disinterested, not an actor with an eye to the main chance, pouring forth a continuity of tradition, striving for perfection, laying a splendid literature under contribution. He saw the heroine of a hundred ‘situations’, variously dramatic and vividly real; he saw the comedy and drama and passion and character and English life; he saw all humanity and history and poetry, and perpetually, in the midst of them, shining out in the high relief of some great moment, an image as fresh as an unveiled statue. He was not unconscious that he was taking all sorts of impossibilities and miracles for granted; but it really seemed to him for the time that the woman he had been watching three hours, the incarnation of the serious drama, would be a new and vivifying force. The world was just then so bright to him that Basil Dashwood struck him at first as an harmonious minister of that force.
     It must be added that before Miriam arrived the breeze that filled Sherringham’s sail began to sink a little. He passed out of the eminently ‘let’ drawing-room, where twenty large photographs of the young actress bloomed in the desert; he went into the garden by a glass-door that stood open, and found Mr Dashwood reclining on a bench and smoking cigarettes. This young man’s conversation was a different music – it took him down, as he felt; showed him, very sensibly and intelligibly, it must be confessed, the actual theatre, the one they were all concerned with, the one they would have to make the miserable best of. It was fortunate for Sherringham that he kept his intoxication mainly to himself : the Englishman’s habit of not being effusive still prevailed with him, even after his years of exposure to the foreign infection. Nothing could have been less exclamatory than the meeting of the two men, with its question or two, its remark or two about Sherringham’s arrival in London; its offhand “I noticed you last night – I was glad you turned up at last,” on one side, and its attenuated “Oh, yes, it was the first time – I was very much interested,” on the other. Basil Dashwood played a part in ‘Yolande’, and Sherringham had had the satisfaction of taking the measure of his aptitude. He judged it to be of the small order, as indeed the part, which was neither that of the virtuous nor that of the villainous hero, restricted him to two or three inconspicuous effects and three or four changes of dress. He represented an ardent but respectful young lover whom the distracted heroine found time to pity a little and even to rail at; but it was impressed upon Sherringham that he scarcely represented young love. He looked very well, but Peter had heard him already in a hundred contemporary pieces; he never got out of rehearsal. He uttered sentiments and breathed vows with a nice voice, with a shy, boyish tremor in it, but as if he were afraid of being chaffed for it afterwards; giving the spectator in the stalls the feeling of holding the prompt-book and listening to a recitation. He made one think of country-houses and lawn-tennis and private theatricals; than which there could not be, to Sherringham’s sense, an association more disconnected with the actor’s art.
     Dashwood knew all about the new thing, the piece in rehearsal; he knew all about everything – receipts and salaries and expenses and newspaper articles, and what old Baskerville said and what Mrs Ruffler thought: matters of superficial concern to Sherringham, who wondered, before Miriam appeared, whether she talked with her ‘walking-gentleman’ about them by the hour, deep in them and finding them not vulgar and boring, but the natural air of her life and the essence of her profession. Of course she did – she naturally would; it was all in the day’s work and he might feel sure she wouldn’t turn up her nose at the shop. He had to remind himself that he didn’t care if she didn’t – that he would think worse of her if she should. She certainly had much confabulation with her competent playfellow, talking shop by the hour: Sherringham could see that from the familiar, customary way Dashwood sat there with his cigarette, as if he were in possession and on his own ground. He divined a great intimacy between the two young artists, but asked himself at the same time what he, Peter Sherringham, had to say about it. He didn’t pretend to control Miriam’s intimacies, it was to be supposed; and if he had encouraged her to adopt a profession which abounded in opportunities for comradeship it was not for him to cry out because she had taken to it kindly. He had already descried a fund of utility in Mrs Lovick’s light brother; but it irritated him all the same, after a while, to hear Basil Dashwood represent himself as almost indispensable. He was practical – there was no doubt of that; and this idea added to Sherringham’s paradoxical sense that as regards the matters actually in question he himself had not this virtue. Dashwood had got Mrs Rooth the house; it happened by a lucky chance that Laura Lumley, to whom it belonged (Sherringham would know Laura Lumley?) wanted to get rid, for a mere song, of the remainder of a lease. She was going to Australia with a troupe of her own. They just stepped into it; it was good air – the best sort of air to live in, to sleep in, in London, for people in their line. Sherringham wondered what Miriam’s personal relations with this deucedly knowing gentleman might be, and was again able to assure himself that they might be anything in the world she liked, for any stake he, Peter, had in them. Dashwood told him of all the smart people who had tried to take up the new star – the way the London world had already held out its hand; and perhaps it was Sherringham’s irritation, the crushed sentiment I just mentioned, that gave a little heave in the exclamation: “Oh, that – that’s all rubbish; the less of that the better!” At this Basil Dashwood stared; he evidently felt snubbed; he had expected his interlocutor to be pleased with the names of the eager ladies who had ‘called’ – which proved to Sherringham that he took a low view of his art. The secretary of embassy explained, it is to be hoped not pedantically, that this art was serious work and that society was humbug and imbecility; also that of old the great comedians wouldn’t have known such people. Garrick had essentially his own circle.
     “No, I suppose they didn’t call, in the old narrow-minded time,” said Basil Dashwood.
     “Your profession didn’t call. They had better company – that of the romantic, gallant characters they represented. They lived with them, and it was better all round.” And Peter asked himself – for the young man looked as if that struck him as a dreary period – if he only, for Miriam, in her new life, or among the futilities of those who tried to find her accessible, expressed the artistic idea. This at least, Sherringham reflected, was a situation that could be improved.
     He learned from Dashwood that the new play, the thing they were rehearsing, was an old play, a romantic drama of thirty years before, covered, from infinite queer handling, with a sort of dirty glaze. Dashwood had a part in it, but there was an act in which he didn’t appear, and that was the act they were doing that morning. ‘Yolande’ had done all ‘Yolande’ could do: Sherringham was mistaken if he supposed ‘Yolande’ was such a tremendous hit. It had done very well, it had run three months, but they were by no means coining money with it. It wouldn’t take them to the end of the season; they had seen for a month past that they would have to put on something else. Miss Rooth moreover wanted a new part; she was impatient to show what a range she was capable of. She had grand ideas; she thought herself very good-natured to repeat the same thing for three months. Basil Dashwood lighted another cigarette and described to his companion some of Miss Rooth’s ideas. He gave Sherringham a great deal of information about her – about her character, her temper, her peculiarities, her little ways, her manner of producing some of her effects. He spoke with familiarity and confidence, as if he knew more about her than any one else – as if he had invented or discovered her, were in a sense her proprietor or guarantor. It was the talk of the shop, with a perceptible shrewdness in it and a touching young candour; the expansiveness of the commercial spirit when it relaxes and generalizes, is conscious it is safe with another member of the guild.
     Sherringham could not help protesting against the lame old war-horse whom it was proposed to bring into action, who had been ridden to death and had saved a thousand desperate fields; and he exclaimed on the strange passion of the good British public for sitting again and again through expected situations, watching for speeches they had heard and surprises that struck the hour. Dashwood defended the taste of London, praised it as loyal, constant, faithful; to which Sherringham retorted with some vivacity that it was faithful to rubbish. He justified this sally by declaring that the play in rehearsal was rubbish, clumsy mediocrity which had outlived its convenience, and that the fault was the want of life in the critical sense of the public, which was ignobly docile, opening its mouth for its dose, like the pupils of Dotheboys Hall; not insisting on something different, on a fresh preparation. Dashwood asked him if he then wished Miss Rooth to go on playing for ever a part she had repeated more than eighty nights on end: he thought the modern ‘run’ was just what he had heard him denounce, in Paris, as the disease the theatre was dying of. This imputation Sherringham gainsaid; he wanted to know if she couldn’t change to something less stale than the piece in question. Dashwood opined that Miss Rooth must have a strong part and that there happened to be one for her in the before-mentioned venerable novelty. She had to take what she could get; she wasn’t a girl to cry for the moon. This was a stop-gap – she would try other things later; she would have to look round her: you couldn’t have a new piece left at your door every day with the milk. On one point Sherringham’s mind might be at rest: Miss Rooth was a woman who would do every blessed thing there was to do. Give her time and she would walk straight through the repertory. She was a woman who would do this – she was a woman who would do that: Basil Dashwood employed this phrase so often that Sherringham, nervous, got up and threw an unsmoked cigarette away. Of course she was a woman: there was no need of Dashwood’s saying it a hundred times!
     As for the repertory, the young man went on, the most beautiful girl in the world could give but what she had. He explained, after Sherringham sat down again, that the noise made by Miss Rooth was not exactly what this admirer appeared to suppose. Sherringham had seen the house the night before; would recognize that, though good, it was very far from great. She had done very well, very well indeed, but she had never gone above a point which Dashwood expressed in pounds sterling, to the edification of his companion, who vaguely thought the figure high. Sherringham remembered that he had been unable to get a stall, but Dashwood insisted that the girl had not leaped into commanding fame: that was a thing that never happened in fact – it happened only in pretentious works of fiction. She had attracted notice, unusual notice for a woman whose name the day before had never been heard of : she was recognized as having, for a novice, extraordinary cleverness and confidence – in addition to her looks of course, which were the thing that had really fetched the crowd. But she hadn’t been the talk of London; she had only been the talk of Gabriel Nash. He wasn’t London, more was the pity. He knew the æsthetic people – the worldly, semi-smart ones, not the frumpy, sickly lot who wore dirty drapery; and the æsthetic people had run after her. Basil Dashwood instructed Sherringham sketchily as to the different sects in the great religion of beauty, and was able to give him the particular ‘note’ of the critical clique to which Miriam had begun so quickly to owe it that she had a vogue. The information made the secretary of embassy feel very ignorant of the world, very uninitiated and buried in his little professional hole. Dashwood warned him that it would be a long time before the general public would wake up to Miss Rooth, even after she had waked up to herself : she would have to do some really big thing first. They knew it was in her, the big thing – Sherringham and he, and even poor Nash – because they had seen her as no one else had; but London never took any one on trust – it had to be cash down. It would take their young lady two or three years to pay out her cash and get her equivalent. But of course the equivalent would be simply a gold-mine. Within its limits however, her success was already quite a fairy-tale: there was magic in the way she had concealed, from the first, her want of experience. She absolutely made you think she had a lot of it, more than any one else. Mr Dashwood repeated several times that she was a cool hand – a deucedly cool hand; and that he watched her himself, saw ideas come to her, saw her try different dodges on different nights. She was always alive – she liked it herself. She gave him ideas, long as he had been on the stage. Naturally she had a great deal to learn – a tremendous lot to learn: a cosmopolite like Sherringham would understand that a girl of that age, who had never had a friend but her mother – her mother was greater fun than ever now – naturally would have. Sherringham winced at being called a ‘cosmopolite’ by his young companion, just as he had winced a moment before at hearing himself lumped, in esoteric knowledge, with Dashwood and Gabriel Nash; but the former of these gentlemen took no account of his sensibility while he enumerated a few of the things that the young actress had to learn. Dashwood was a mixture of acuteness and innocent fatuity; and Sherringham had to recognize that he had some of the elements of criticism in him when he said that the wonderful thing in the girl was that she learned so fast – learned something every night, learned from the same old piece a lot more than any one else would have learned from twenty. “That’s what it is to be a genius,” Sherringham remarked. “Genius is only the art of getting your experience fast, of stealing it, as it were; and in this sense Miss Rooth’s a regular brigand.” Dashwood assented good-humouredly; then he added, “Oh, she’ll do!” It was exactly in these simple words, in speaking to her, that Sherringham had phrased the same truth; yet he didn’t enjoy hearing them on his neighbour’s lips: they had a profane, patronizing sound, suggestive of displeasing equalities.
     The two men sat in silence for some minutes, watching a fat robin hop about on the little seedy lawn; at the end of which they heard a vehicle stop on the other side of the garden wall and the voices of people descending from it. “Here they come, the dear creatures,” said Basil Dashwood, without moving; and from where they sat Sherringham saw the small door in the wall pushed open. The dear creatures were three in number, for a gentleman had added himself to Mrs Rooth and her daughter. As soon as Miriam’s eyes fell upon her Parisian friend she stopped short, in a large, droll theatrical attitude, and, seizing her mother’s arm, exclaimed passionately: “Look where he sits, the author of all my woes – cold, cynical, cruel!” She was evidently in the highest spirits; of which Mrs Rooth partook as she cried indulgently, giving her a slap: “Oh, get along, you gipsy!”
     “She’s always up to something,” Basil Dashwood commented, as Miriam, radiant and with a conscious stage tread, glided toward Sherringham as if she were coming to the footlights. He rose slowly from his seat, looking at her and struck with her beauty; he had been impatient to see her, yet in the act his impatience had had a disconcerting check.
     Sherringham had had time to perceive that the man who had come in with her was Gabriel Nash, and this recognition brought a low sigh to his lips as he held out his hand to her – a sigh expressive of the sudden sense that his interest in her now could only be a gross community. Of course that didn’t matter, since he had set it, at the most, such rigid limits; but none the less he stood vividly reminded that it would be public and notorious, that inferior people would be inveterately mixed up with it, that she had crossed the line and sold herself to the vulgar, making him indeed only one of an equalized multitude. The way Gabriel Nash turned up there just when he didn’t want to see him made Peter feel that it was a complicated thing to have a friendship with an actress so clearly destined to he famous. He quite forgot that Nash had known Miriam long before his own introduction to her and had been present at their first meeting, which he had in fact in a measure brought about. Had Sherringham not been so cut out to make trouble of this particular joy he might have found some adequate assurance that she distinguished him in the way in which, taking his hand in both of hers, she looked up at him and murmured, “Dear old master!” Then, as if this were not acknowledgement enough, she raised her head still higher and, whimsically, gratefully, charmingly, almost nobly, she kissed him on the lips, before the other men, before the good mother whose “Oh, you honest creature!” made everything regular.

     If Peter Sherringham was ruffled by some of Miriam’s circumstances there was comfort and consolation to be drawn from others, beside the essential fascination (there was no doubt about that now) of the young lady’s own society. He spent the afternoon, they all spent the afternoon, and the occasion reminded him of a scene in ‘Wilhelm Meister’. Mrs Rooth had little resemblance to Mignon, but Miriam was remarkably like Philina. Luncheon was delayed two or three hours; but the long wait was a positive source of gaiety, for they all smoked cigarettes in the garden and Miriam gave striking illustrations of the parts she was studying. Sherringham was in the state of a man whose toothache has suddenly stopped – he was exhilarated by the cessation of pain. The pain had been the effort to remain in Paris after Miriam came to London, and the balm of seeing her now was the measure of the previous soreness.
     Gabriel Nash had, as usual, plenty to say, and he talked of Nick Dormer’s picture so long that Sherringham wondered whether he did it on purpose to vex him. They went in and out of the house; they made excursions to see how lunch was coming on; and Sherringham got half an hour alone, or virtually alone, with the object of his unsanctioned passion – drawing her publicly away from the others and making her sit with him in the most sequestered part of the little gravelled grounds. There was summer enough in the trees to shut out the adjacent villas, and Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash lounged together at a convenient distance, while Nick’s whimsical friend tried experiments upon the histrionic mind. Miriam confessed that, like all comedians, they ate at queer hours; she sent Dashwood in for biscuits and sherry – she proposed sending him round to the grocer’s in the Circus Road for superior wine. Sherringham judged him to be the factotum of the little household: he knew where the biscuits were kept and the state of the grocer’s account. When Peter congratulated the young actress on having so useful an associate she said genially, but as if the words disposed of him: “Oh, he’s awfully handy!” To this she added: “You’re not, you know;” resting the kindest, most pitying eyes on him. The sensation they gave him was as sweet as if she had stroked his cheek, and her manner was responsive even to tenderness. She called him “Dear master” again, and sometimes “Cher maître”, and appeared to express gratitude and reverence by every intonation.
     “You’re doing the humble dependant now,” he said: “you do it beautifully, as you do everything.” She replied that she didn’t make it humble enough – she couldn’t; she was too proud, too insolent in her triumph. She liked that, the triumph, too much, and she didn’t mind telling him that she was perfectly happy. Of course as yet the triumph was very limited; but success was success, whatever its quantity; the dish was a small one, but it had the right taste. Her imagination had already bounded beyond the first phase, unexpectedly brilliant as this had been: her position struck her as modest compared with a future that was now vivid to her. Sherringham had never seen her so soft and sympathetic; she had insisted, in Paris, that her personal character was that of the good girl (she used the term in a fine loose way), and it was impossible to be a better girl than she showed herself this pleasant afternoon. She was full of gossip and anecdote and drollery; she had exactly the air that he would have liked her to have – that of thinking of no end of things to tell him. It was as if she had just returned from a long journey, had had strange adventures and made wonderful discoveries. She began to speak of this and that, and broke off to speak of something else; she talked of the theatre, of the newspapers and then of London, of the people she had met and the extraordinary things they said to her, of the parts she was going to take up, of lots of new ideas that had come to her about the art of comedy. She wanted to do comedy now – to do the comedy of London life. She was delighted to find that seeing more of the world suggested things to her; they came straight from the fact, from nature, if you could call it nature: so that she was convinced more than ever that the artist ought to live, to get on with his business, gather ideas, lights from experience – ought to welcome any experience that would give him lights. But work, of course, was experience, and everything in one’s life that was good was work. That was the jolly thing in the actor’s trade – it made up for other elements that were odious: if you only kept your eyes open nothing could happen to you that wouldn’t be food for observation and grist to your mill, showing you how people looked and moved and spoke – cried and grimaced, or writhed and dissimulated, in given situations. She saw all round her things she wanted to ‘do’ – London was full of them, if you had eyes to see. Miriam demanded imperiously why people didn’t take them up, put them into plays and parts, give one a chance with them: she expressed her sharp impatience of the general literary stupidity. She had never been chary of this particular displeasure, and there were moments (it was an old story and a subject of frank raillery to Sherringham) when to hear her you might have thought there was no cleverness anywhere but in her disdainful mind. She wanted tremendous things done, that she might use them, but she didn’t pretend to say exactly what they were to be, nor even approximately how they were to be handled: her ground was rather that if she only had a pen – it was exasperating to have to explain! She mainly contented herself with declaring that nothing had really been touched: she felt that more and more as she saw more of people’s goings-on.
     Sherringham went to her theatre again that evening and he made no scruple of going every night for a week. Rather, perhaps I should say, he made a scruple; but it was a part of the pleasure of his life during these arbitrary days to overcome it. The only way to prove to himself that he could overcome it was to go; and he was satisfied, after he had been seven times, not only with the spectacle on the stage but with his own powers of demonstration. There was no satiety however with the spectacle on the stage, inasmuch as that only produced a further curiosity. Miriam’s performance was a living thing, with a power to change, to grow, to develop, to beget new forms of the same life. Peter Sherringham contributed to it in his amateurish way, watching with solicitude the fate of his contributions. He talked it over in Balaklava Place, suggested modifications, variations worth trying. Miriam professed herself thankful for any refreshment that could be administered to her interest in ‘Yolande’, and, with an effectiveness that showed large resource, touched up her part and drew several new airs from it. Sherringham’s suggestions bore upon her way of uttering certain speeches, the intonations that would have more beauty or make the words mean more. Miriam had her ideas, or rather she had her instincts, which she defended and illustrated, with a vividness superior to argument, by a happy pictorial phrase or a snatch of mimicry; but she was always for trying; she liked experiments and caught at them, and she was especially thankful when some one gave her a showy reason, a plausible formula, in a case where she only stood upon an intuition. She pretended to despise reasons and to like and dislike at her sovereign pleasure; but she always honoured the exotic gift, so that Sherringham was amused with the liberal way she produced it, as if she had been a naked islander rejoicing in a present of crimson cloth.
     Day after day he spent most of his time in her society, and Miss Laura Lumley’s recent habitation became the place in London to which his thoughts were most attached. He was highly conscious that he was not now carrying out that principle of abstention which he had brought to such maturity before leaving Paris; but he contented himself with a much cruder justification of this inconsequence than he would have thought adequate in advance. It consisted simply in the idea that to be identified with the first public steps of a young genius was a delightful experience. What was the harm of it, if the genius were real? Sherringham’s main security was now that his relations with Miriam had been frankly placed under the protection of the idea of legitimate extravagance. In this department they made a very creditable figure and required much less watching and pruning than when it was his effort to fit them into a worldly plan. Sherringham had a sense of real wisdom when he said to himself that it surely should be enough that this momentary intellectual participation in the girl’s dawning fame was a charming thing. Charming things, in a busy man’s life, were not frequent enough to be kicked out of the way. Balaklava Place, looked at in this philosophic way, became almost idyllic: it gave Peter the pleasantest impression he had ever had of London.
     The season happened to be remarkably fine; the temperature was high, but not so high as to keep people from the theatre. Miriam’s ‘business’ visibly increased, so that the question of putting on the second play underwent some reconsideration. The girl insisted, showing in her insistence a temper of which Sherringham had already caught some splendid gleams. It was very evident that through her career it would be her expectation to carry things with a high hand. Her managers and agents would not find her an easy victim or a calculable force: but the public would adore her, surround her with the popularity that attaches to a humorous, good-natured princess, and her comrades would have a kindness for her because she wouldn’t be selfish. They too would form in a manner a portion of her affectionate public. This was the way Sherringham read the signs, liking her whimsical tolerance of some of her vulgar playfellows almost well enough to forgive their presence in Balaklava Place, where they were a sore trial to her mother, who wanted her to multiply her points of contact only with the higher orders. There were hours when Sherringham thought he foresaw that her principal relation to the proper world would be to have, within two or three years, a grand battle with it, making it take her, if she let it have her at all, absolutely on her own terms: a picture which led our young man to ask himself, with a helplessness that was not exempt, as he perfectly knew, from absurdity, what part he should find himself playing in such a contest and if it would be reserved to him to be the more ridiculous as a peacemaker or as a heavy auxiliary.
     “She might know any one she would, and the only person she appears to take any pleasure in is that dreadful Miss Rover,” Mrs Rooth whimpered, more than once, to Sherringham, who recognized in the young lady so designated the principal complication of Balaklava Place.
     Miss Rover was a little actress who played at Miriam’s theatre, combining with an unusual aptitude for delicate comedy a less exceptional absence of rigour in private life. She was pretty and quick and clever, and had a fineness that Miriam professed herself already in a position to estimate as rare. She had no control of her inclinations; yet sometimes they were wholly laudable, like the devotion she had formed for her beautiful colleague, whom she admired not only as an ornament of the profession but as a being of a more fortunate essence. She had had an idea that real ladies were ‘nasty’; but Miriam was not nasty, and who could gainsay that Miriam was a real lady? The girl justified herself to Sherringham, who had found no fault with her; she knew how much her mother feared that the proper world wouldn’t come in if they knew that the improper, in the person of pretty Miss Rover, was on the ground. What did she care who came and who didn’t, and what was to he gained by receiving half the snobs in London? People would have to take her exactly as they found her – that they would have to learn; and they would be much mistaken if they thought her capable of becoming a snob too for the sake of their sweet company. She didn’t pretend to be anything but what she meant to be, the best general actress of her time; and what had that to do with her seeing or not seeing a poor ignorant girl who had lov— Well, she needn’t say what Fanny had. She had met her in the way of business – she didn’t say she would have run after her. She had liked her because she wasn’t a stick, and when Fanny Rover had asked her quite wistfully if she mightn’t come and see her, she hadn’t bristled with scandalized virtue. Miss Rover was not a bit more stupid or more ill-natured than any one else: it would be time enough to shut the door when she should become so.
     Sherringham commended even to extravagance the liberality of such comradeship; said that of course a woman didn’t go into that profession to see how little she could swallow. She was right to live with the others so long as they were at all possible, and it was for her, and only for her, to judge how long that might be. This was rather heroic on Peter’s part, for his assumed detachment from the girl’s personal life still left him a margin for some forms of uneasiness. It would have made, in his spirit, a great difference for the worse that the woman he loved, and for whom he wished no baser lover than himself, should have embraced the prospect of consorting only with the cheaper kind. It was all very well, but Fanny Rover was simply a cabotine, and that sort of association was an odd training for a young woman who was to have been good enough (he couldn’t forget that – he kept remembering it as if it might still have a future use) to be his wife. Certainly he ought to have thought of such things before he permitted himself to become so interested in a theatrical nature. His heroism did him service however for the hour: it helped him by the end of the week to feel tremendously broken in to Miriam’s little circle. What helped him most indeed was to reflect that she would get tired of a good many of its members herself in time; for it was not that they were shocking (very few of them shone with that intense light), but that they could be trusted in the long run to bore you.
     There was a lovely Sunday in particular that he spent almost wholly in Balaklava Place – he arrived so early – when, in the afternoon, all sorts of odd people dropped in. Miriam held a reception in the little garden and insisted on almost all the company’s staying to supper. Her mother shed tears to Sherringham, in the desecrated house, because they had accepted, Miriam and she, an invitation – and in Cromwell Road too – for the evening. Miriam decreed that they shouldn’t go: they would have much better fun with their good friends at home. She sent off a message – it was a terrible distance – by a cabman, and Sherringham had the privilege of paying the messenger. Basil Dashwood, in another vehicle, proceeded to an hotel that he knew, a mile away, for supplementary provisions, and came back with a cold ham and a dozen of champagne. It was all very Bohemian and journalistic and picturesque, very supposedly droll and enviable to outsiders; and Miriam told anecdotes and gave imitations of the people she would have met if she had gone out: so no one had a sense of loss – the two occasions were fantastically united. Mrs  Rooth drank champagne for consolation; though the consolation was imperfect when she remembered that she might have drunk it (not quite so much indeed) in Cromwell Road.
     Taken in connection with the evening before, the day formed for Sherringham the most complete exhibition he had had of Miriam Rooth. He had been at the theatre, to which the Saturday night happened to have brought the fullest house she had yet played to, and he came early to Balaklava Place, to tell her once again (he had told her half a dozen times the evening before) that, with the excitement of her biggest audience, she had surpassed herself, acted with remarkable intensity. It pleased her to hear it, and the spirit with which she interpreted the signs of the future and, during an hour he spent alone with her, Mrs Rooth being up-stairs and Basil Dashwood not arrived, treated him to specimens of fictive emotion of various kinds, was beyond any natural abundance that he had yet seen in a woman. The impression could scarcely have been other if she had been playing wild snatches to him at the piano: the bright, up-darting flame of her talk rose and fell like an improvisation on the keys. Later, all the rest of the day, he was fascinated by the good grace with which she fraternized with her visitors, finding the right words for each, the solvent of incongruities, the right ideas to keep vanity quiet and make humility gay. It was a wonderful expenditure of generous, nervous life. But what Sherringham read in it above all was the sense of success in youth, with the future large, and the action of that force upon all the faculties. Miriam’s limited past had yet pinched her enough to make emancipation sweet, and the emancipation had come at last in an hour. She had stepped into her magic shoes, divined and appropriated everything they could give her, become in a day a really original contemporary. Sherringham was of course not less conscious of that than Nick Dormer had been when, in the cold light of his studio, he saw how she had altered.
     But the great thing, to his mind and, these first days, the irresistible seduction of the theatre, was that she was a rare incarnation of beauty. Beauty was the principle of everything she did and of the way, unerringly, she did it – an exquisite harmony of line and motion and attitude and tone, what was most general and most characteristic in her performance. Accidents and instincts played together to this end and constituted something which was independent of her talent or of her merit, in a given case, and which in its influence, to Sherringham’s imagination, was far superior to any merit and to any talent. It was a supreme infallible felicity, a source of importance, a stamp of absolute value. To see it in operation, to sit within its radius and feel it shift and revolve and change and never fail, was a corrective to the depression, the humiliation, the bewilderment of life. It transported Sherringham from the vulgar hour and the ugly fact; drew him to something which had no reason but its sweetness, no name nor place save as the pure, the distant, the antique. It was what most made him say to himself : “Oh, hang it, what does it matter?” when he reflected that an homme sérieux (as they said in Paris) rather gave himself away (as they said in America) by going every night to the same theatre for all the world to stare. It was what kept him from doing anything but hover round Miriam – kept him from paying any other visits, from attending to any business, from going back to Calcutta Gardens. It was a spell which he shrank intensely from breaking, and the cause of a hundred postponements, confusions and incoherences. It made of the crooked little stucco villa in St John’s Wood a place in the upper air, commanding the prospect; a nest of winged liberties and ironies, hanging far aloft above the huddled town. One should live at altitudes when one could – they braced and simplified; and for a happy interval Sherringham never touched the earth.
     It was not that there were no influences tending at moments to drag him down – an abasement from which he escaped only because he was up so high. We have seen that Basil Dashwood could affect him at times like a piece of wood tied to his ankle, through the circumstance that he made Miriam’s famous conditions – those of the public exhibition of her genius – seem small and prosaic; so that Sherringham had to remind himself that perhaps this smallness was involved in their being at all. She carried his imagination off into infinite spaces, whereas she carried Dashwood’s only into the box-office and the revival of plays that were barbarously bad. The worst was that it was open to him to believe that a sharp young man who was in the business might know better than he. Another possessor of superior knowledge (he talked, that is, as if he knew better than any one) was Gabriel Nash, who appeared to have abundant leisure to haunt Balaklava Place, or in other words appeared to enjoy the same command of his time as Peter Sherringham. Our young diplomatist regarded him with mingled feelings, for he had not forgotten the contentious character of their first meeting or the degree to which he had been moved to urge upon Nick Dormer’s consideration that his talkative friend was probably an ass. This personage turned up now as an admirer of the charming creature he had scoffed at, and there was something exasperating in the quietude of his inconsistency, of which he had not the least embarrassing consciousness. Indeed he had such arbitrary and desultory ways of looking at any question that it was difficult, in vulgar parlance, to have him; his sympathies hummed about like bees in a garden, with no visible plan, no economy in their flight. He thought meanly of the modern theatre and yet he had discovered a fund of satisfaction in the most promising of its exponents; so that Sherringham more than once said to him that he should really, to keep his opinions at all in hand, attach more value to the stage or less to the interesting actress. Miriam made infinitely merry at his expense and treated him as the most abject of her slaves: all of which was worth seeing as an exhibition, on Nash’s part, of the imperturbable. When Sherringham mentally pronounced him impudent he felt guilty of an injustice – Nash had so little the air of a man with something to gain. Nevertheless he felt a certain itching in his boot-toe when his fellow-visitor exclaimed, explicatively (in general to Miriam herself), in answer to a charge of tergiversation: “Oh, it’s all right: it’s the voice, you know – the enchanting voice!” He meant by this, as indeed he more fully set forth, that he came to the theatre, or to the villa in St John’s Wood, simply to treat his ear to the sound (the richest then to be heard on earth, as he maintained) issuing from Miriam’s lips. Its richness was quite independent of the words she might pronounce or the poor fable they might subserve, and if the pleasure of hearing her in public was the greater by reason of the larger volume of her utterance, it was still highly agreeable to see her at home, for it was there that the artistic nature that he freely conceded to her came out most. He spoke as if she had been formed by the bounty of nature to be his particular recreation, and as if, being an expert in innocent joys, he took his pleasure wherever he found it.
     He was perpetually in the field, sociable, amiable, communicative, inveterately contradicted but never confounded, ready to talk to any one about anything and making disagreement (of which he left the responsibility wholly to others) a basis of intimacy. Every one knew what he thought of the theatrical profession, and yet it could not be said that he did not regard its members as the exponents of comedy, inasmuch as he often elicited their foibles in a way that made even Sherringham laugh, notwithstanding his attitude of reserve where Nash was concerned. At any rate, though he had committed himself on the subject of the general fallacy of their attempt, he put up with their company, for the sake of Miriam’s accents, with a practical philosophy that was all his own. Miriam pretended that he was her supreme, her incorrigible adorer, masquerading as a critic to save his vanity and tolerated for his secret constancy in spite of being a bore. To Sherringham he was not a bore, and the secretary of embassy felt a certain displeasure at not being able to regard him as one. He had seen too many strange countries and curious things, observed and explored too much to be void of illustration. Peter had a suspicion that if he himself was in the grandes espaces Gabriel Nash probably had a still wider range. If among Miriam’s associates Basil Dashwood dragged him down, Gabriel challenged him rather to higher and more fantastic flights. If he saw the girl in larger relations than the young actor, who mainly saw her in ill-written parts, Nash went a step further and regarded her, irresponsibly and sublimely, as a priestess of harmony, with whom the vulgar ideas of success and failure had nothing to do. He laughed at her ‘parts’, holding that without them she would be great. Sherringham envied him his power to content himself with the pleasures he could get: he had a shrewd impression that contentment was not destined to be the sweetener of his own repast.
     Above all Nash held his attention by a constant element of unstudied reference to Nick Dormer, who, as we know, had suddenly become much more interesting to his cousin. Sherringham found food for observation, and in some measure for perplexity, in the relations of all these clever people with each other. He knew why his sister, who had a personal impatience of unapplied ideas, had not been agreeably affected by Mr Nash and had not viewed with complacency a predilection for him in the man she was to marry. This was a side by which he had no desire to resemble Julia Dallow, for he needed no teaching to divine that Gabriel had not set her intelligence in motion. He, Peter, would have been sorry to have to confess that he could not understand him. He understood furthermore that Miriam, in Nick’s studio, might very well have appeared to Julia a formidable power. She was younger, but she had quite as much her own form and she was beautiful enough to have made Nick compare her with Mrs Dallow even if he had been in love with that lady – a pretension as to which Peter had private ideas.
     Sherringham for many days saw nothing of the member for Harsh, though it might have been said that, by implication, he participated in the life of Balaklava Place. Had Nick given Julia tangible grounds, and was his unexpectedly fine rendering of Miriam an act of virtual infidelity? In that case in what degree was Miriam to be regarded as an accomplice in his defection, and what was the real nature of this young lady’s esteem for her new and (as he might he called) distinguished ally? These questions would have given Peter still more to think about if he had not flattered himself that he had made up his mind that they concerned Nick and Miriam infinitely more than they concerned him. Miriam was personally before him, so that he had no need to consult for his pleasure his fresh recollection of the portrait. But he thought of this striking production each time he thought of his enterprising kinsman. And that happened often, for in his hearing Miriam often discussed the happy artist and his possibilities with Gabriel Nash, and Gabriel broke out about them to Miriam. The girl’s tone on the subject was frank and simple: she only said, with an iteration that was slightly irritating that Mr Dormer had been tremendously kind to her. She never mentioned Julia’s irruption to Julia’s brother; she only referred to the portrait, with inscrutable amenity, as a direct consequence of Peter’s fortunate suggestion that first day at Madame Carré’s. Gabriel Nash, however, showed such a disposition to expatiate sociably and luminously on the peculiarly interesting character of what he called Dormer’s predicament and on the fine suspense which it was fitted to kindle in the breast of discerning friends, that Peter wondered, as I have already hinted, if this insistence were not a subtle perversity, a devilish little invention to torment a man whose jealousy was presumable. Yet on the whole Nash struck him as but scantily devilish and as still less occupied with the prefigurement of his emotions. Indeed, he threw a glamour of romance over Nick; tossed off such illuminating yet mystifying references to him that Sherringham found himself capable of a magnanimous curiosity, a desire to follow out the chain of events. He learned from Gabriel that Nick was still away, and he felt as if he could almost submit to instruction, to initiation. The rare charm of these unregulated days was troubled – it ceased to be idyllic – when, late on the evening of the second Sunday, he walked away with Gabriel southward from St John’s Wood. For then something came out.

     It mattered not so much what the doctors thought (and Sir Matthew Hope, the greatest of them all, had been down twice in one week) as that Mr Chayter, the omniscient butler, declared with all the authority of his position and his experience that Mr Carteret was very bad indeed. Nick Dormer had a long talk with him (it lasted six minutes) the day he hurried to Beauclere in response to a telegram. It was Mr Chayter who had taken upon himself to telegraph, in spite of the presence in the house of Mr Carteret’s nearest relation and only surviving sister, Mrs Lendon. This lady, a large, mild, healthy woman, with a heavy tread, who liked early breakfasts, uncomfortable chairs and the advertisement-sheet of the Times, had arrived the week before and was awaiting the turn of events. She was a widow and lived in Cornwall, in a house nine miles from a station, which had, to make up for this inconvenience, as she had once told Nick, a delightful old herbaceous garden. She was extremely fond of an herbaceous garden; her principal interest was in that direction. Nick had often seen her – she came to Beauclere once or twice a year. Her sojourn there made no great difference; she was only an “Urania dear,” for Mr Carteret to look across the table at when, on the close of dinner, it was time for her to retire. She went out of the room always as if it were after some one else; and on the gentlemen ‘joining’ her later (the junction was not very close) she received them with an air of gratified surprise.
     Chayter honoured Nick Dormer with a regard which approached, without improperly competing with it, the affection his master had placed on the same young head, and Chayter knew a good many things. Among them he knew his place; but it was wonderful how little that knowledge had rendered him inaccessible to other kinds. He took upon himself to send for Nick without speaking to Mrs Lendon, whose influence was now a good deal like that of a large occasional piece of furniture which had been introduced in case it should be required. She was one of the solid conveniences that a comfortable house would have; but you couldn’t talk with a mahogany sofa or a folding-screen. Chayter knew how much she had ‘had’ from her brother, and how much her two daughters had each received on marriage; and he was of the opinion that it was quite enough, especially considering the society in which they (you could scarcely call it) moved. He knew beyond this that they would all have more, and that was why he hesitated little about communicating with Nick. If Mrs Lendon should be ruffled at the intrusion of a young man who neither was the child of a cousin nor had been formally adopted, Chayter was parliamentary enough to see that the forms of debate were observed. He had indeed a slightly compassionate sense that Mrs Lendon was not easily ruffled. She was always down an extraordinary time before breakfast (Chayter refused to take it as in the least admonitory), but she usually went straight into the garden (as if to see that none of the plants had been stolen in the night), and had in the end to be looked for by the footman in some out-of-the-way spot behind the shrubbery, where, plumped upon the ground, she was doing something ‘rum’ to a flower.
     Mr Carteret himself had expressed no wishes. He slept most of the time (his failure at the last had been sudden, but he was rheumatic and seventy-seven), and the situation was in Chayter’s hands. Sir Matthew Hope had opined, even on his second visit, that he would rally and go on, in rudimentary comfort, some time longer; but Chayter took a different and a still more intimate view. Nick was embarrassed: he scarcely knew what he was there for from the moment he could give his good old friend no conscious satisfaction. The doctors, the nurses, the servants, Mrs Lendon, and above all the settled equilibrium of the square, thick house, where an immutable order appeared to slant through the polished windows and tinkle in the quieter bells, all represented best the kind of supreme solace to which the master was most accessible.
     For the first day it was judged better that Nick should not be introduced into the darkened chamber. This was the decision of the two decorous nurses, of whom the visitor had had a glimpse and who, with their black uniforms and fresh faces of business, suggested a combination of the barmaid and the nun. He was depressed, yet restless, felt himself in a false position and thought it lucky Mrs Lendon had powers of placid acceptance. They were old acquaintances: she treated him with a certain ceremony, but it was not the rigour of mistrust. It was much more an expression of remote Cornish respect for young abilities and distinguished connections, inasmuch as she asked him a great deal about Lady Agnes and about Lady Flora and Lady Elizabeth. He knew she was kind and ungrudging, and his principal chagrin was the sense of meagre information and of responding poorly in regard to his uninteresting aunts. He sat in the garden with newspapers and looked at the lowered blinds in Mr Carteret’s windows; he wandered around the abbey with cigarettes and lightened his tread and felt grave, wishing that everything were over. He would have liked much to see Mr Carteret again, but he had no desire that Mr Carteret should see him. In the evening he dined with Mrs Lendon, and she talked to him, at his request and as much as she could, about her brother’s early years, his beginnings of life. She was so much younger that they appeared to have been rather a tradition of her own youth; but her talk made Nick feel how tremendously different Mr Carteret had been at that period from what he, Nick, was to-day. He had published at the age of thirty a little volume (it was thought wonderfully clever) called ‘The Incidence of Rates’; but Nick had not yet collected the material for any such treatise. After dinner Mrs Lendon, who was in full dress, retired to the drawing-room, where at the end of ten minutes she was followed by Nick, who had remained behind only because he thought Chayter would expect it. Mrs Lendon almost shook hands with him again, and then Chayter brought in coffee. Almost in no time afterwards he brought in tea, and the occupants of the drawing-room sat for a slow half-hour, during which the lady looked round at the apartment with a sigh and said: “Don’t you think poor Charles had exquisite taste?”
     Fortunately at this moment the ‘local man’ was ushered in. He had been up-stairs and he entered, smiling, with the remark: “It’s quite wonderful – it’s quite wonderful.” What was wonderful was a marked improvement in the breathing, a distinct indication of revival. The doctor had some tea and he chatted for a quarter of an hour in a way that showed what a ‘good’ manner and how large an experience a local man could have. When he went away Nick walked out with him. The doctor’s house was near by and he had come on foot. He left Nick with the assurance that in all probability Mr Carteret, who was certainly picking up, would be able to see him on the morrow. Our young man turned his steps again to the abbey and took a stroll about it in the starlight. It never looked so huge as when it reared itself in the night, and Nick had never felt more fond of it than on this occasion, more comforted and confirmed by its beauty. When he came back he was readmitted by Chayter, who surveyed him in respectful deprecation of the frivolity which had led him to attempt to help himself through such an evening in such a way.
     Nick went to bed early and slept badly, which was unusual with him; but it was a pleasure to him to be told almost as soon as he came out of his room that Mr Carteret had asked for him. He went in to see him and was struck with the change in his appearance. He had however spent a day with him just after the New Year, and another at the beginning of March, so that he had perceived the first symptoms of mortal alteration. A week after Julia Dallow’s departure for the Continent Nick had devoted several hours to Beauclere and to the intention of telling his old friend how the happy event had been brought to naught – the advantage that he had been so good as to desire for him and to make the condition of a splendid gift. Before this, for a few days, Nick had been keeping back, to announce it personally, the good news that Julia had at last set their situation in order: he wanted to enjoy the old man’s pleasure – so sore a trial had her arbitrary behaviour been for a year. Mrs Dallow had offered Mr Carteret a conciliatory visit before Christmas – had come down from London one day to lunch with him, but only with the effect of making him subsequently exhibit to poor Nick, as the victim of her whimsical hardness, a great deal of earnest commiseration in a jocose form. Upon his honour, as he said, she was as clever and ‘specious’ a woman (this was the odd expression he used) as he had ever seen in his life. The merit of her behaviour on this occasion, as Nick knew, was that she had not been specious at her lover’s expense: she had breathed no doubt of his public purpose and had had the feminine courage to say that in truth she was older than he, so that it was only fair to give his affections time to mature. But when Nick saw their sympathizing host after the rupture that I lately narrated he found him in no state to encounter a disappointment: he was seriously ailing, it was the beginning of worse things and no time for trying on a sensation. After this excursion Nick went back to town saddened by Mr Carteret’s now unmistakably settled decline, but rather relieved that he had not been forced to make his confession. It had even occurred to him that the need for making it might not come up if the ebb of his old friend’s strength should continue unchecked. He might pass away in the persuasion that everything would happen as he wished it, though indeed without enriching Nick on his wedding-day to the tune that he had promised. Very likely he had made legal arrangements in virtue of which his bounty would take effect in the right conditions and in them alone. At present Nick had a larger confession to treat him to – the last three days had made the difference; but, oddly enough, though his responsibility had increased his reluctance to speak had vanished: he was positively eager to clear up a situation over which it was not consistent with his honour to leave a shade.
     The doctor had been right when he came in after dinner; it was clear in the morning that they had not seen the last of Mr Carteret’s power of picking up. Chayter, who had been in to see him, refused austerely to change his opinion with every change in his master’s temperature; but the nurses took the cheering view that it would do their patient good for Mr Dormer to sit with him a little. One of them remained in the room, in the deep window-seat, and Nick spent twenty minutes by the bedside. It was not a case for much conversation, but Mr Carteret seemed to like to look at him. There was life in his kind old eyes, which would express itself yet in some further wise provision. He laid his liberal hand on Nick’s with a confidence which showed it was not yet disabled. He said very little, and the nurse had recommended that the visitor himself should not overflow in speech; but from time to time he murmured with a faint smile: “To-night’s division, you know – you mustn’t miss it.” There was to be no division that night, as it happened, but even Mr Carteret’s aberrations were parliamentary. Before Nick left him he had been able to assure him that he was rapidly getting better, that such valuable hours must not be wasted. “Come back on Friday, if they come to the second reading.” These were the words with which Nick was dismissed, and at noon the doctor said the invalid was doing very well but that Nick had better leave him alone for that day. Our young man accordingly determined to go up to town for the night and even, if he should receive no summons, for the next day. He arranged with Chayter that he should he telegraphed to if Mr Carteret were either better or worse.
     “Oh, he can’t very well be worse, sir,” Chayter replied, inexorably; but he relaxed so far as to remark that of course it wouldn’t do for Nick to neglect the House.
     “Oh, the House!” Nick sighed, ambiguously, avoiding the butler’s eye. It would be easy enough to tell Mr Carteret, but nothing would have sustained him in the effort to make a clean breast to Chayter.
     He might be ambiguous about the House, but he had the sense of things to be done awaiting him in London. He telegraphed to his servant and spent that night in Rosedale Road. The things to be done were apparently to be done in his studio: his servant met him there with a large bundle of letters. He failed that evening to stray within two miles of Westminster, and the legislature of his country reassembled without his support. The next morning he received a telegram from Chayter, to whom he had given Rosedale Road as an address. This missive simply informed him that Mr Carteret wished to see him, and it seemed to imply that he was better, though Chayter wouldn’t say so. Nick again took his place in the train to Beauclere. He had been there very often, but it was present to him that now, after a little, he should go only once more, for a particular dismal occasion. All that was over – everything that belonged to it was over. He learned on his arrival – he saw Mrs Lendon immediately – that his old friend had continued to pick up. He had expressed a strong and a perfectly rational desire to talk with Nick, and the doctor had said that if it was about anything important it was much better not to oppose him. “He says it’s about something very important,” Mrs Lendon remarked, resting shy eyes on him while she added that she was looking after her brother for the hour. She had sent those wonderful young ladies out to see the abbey. Nick paused with her outside of Mr Carteret’s door. He wanted to say something comfortable to her in return for her homely charity – give her a hint which she was far from looking for, that practically he had now no interest in her brother’s estate. This was impossible of course. Her absence of irony gave him no pretext, and such an allusion would be an insult to her simple discretion. She was either not thinking of his interest at all, or she was thinking of it with the tolerance of a mind trained to a hundred decent submissions. Nick looked for an instant into her mild, uninvestigating eyes, and it came over him supremely that the goodness of these people was singularly pure: they were a part of what was cleanest and sanest and dullest in humanity. There had been just a little mocking inflection in Mrs Lendon’s pleasant voice; but it was dedicated to the young ladies in the black uniforms (she could perhaps be satirical about them), and not to the theory of the ‘importance’ of Nick’s interview with her brother. Nick’s arrested desire to let her know he was not dangerous translated itself into a vague friendliness and into the abrupt, rather bewildering words: “I can’t tell you half the good I think of you.” As he passed into Mr Carteret’s room it occurred to him that she would perhaps interpret this speech as an acknowledgement of obligation – of her good-nature in not keeping him away from the rich old man.

     Mr Carteret was propped up on pillows, and in this attitude, beneath the high, spare canopy of his bed, presented himself to Nick’s picture-seeking vision as a figure in a clever composition or a novel. He had gathered strength, though this strength was not much in his voice; it was mainly in his brighter eye and his air of being pleased with himself. He put out his hand and said: “I dare say you know why I sent for you”; upon which Nick sank into the seat he had occupied the day before, replying that he had been delighted to come, whatever the reason. Mr Carteret said nothing more about the division or the second reading; he only murmured that they were keeping the newspapers for him. “I’m rather behind – I’m rather behind,” he went on; “but two or three quiet mornings will make it all right. You can go back to-night, you know – you can easily go back.” This was the only thing not quite straight that Nick saw in him – his making light of his young friend’s flying to and fro. Nick sat looking at him with a sense that was half compunction and half the idea of the rare beauty of his face, to which, strangely, the waste of illness now seemed to have restored some of its youth. Mr Carteret was evidently conscious that this morning he should not be able to go on long, so that he must be practical and concise. “I dare say you know – you have only to remember,” he continued.
     “You know what a pleasure it is to me to see you – there can be no better reason than that.”
     “Hasn’t the year come round – the year of that foolish arrangement?”
     Nick thought a little, asking himself if it were really necessary to disturb his companion’s earnest faith. Then the consciousness of the falsity of his own position surged over him again, and he replied: “Do you mean the period for which Mrs Dallow insisted on keeping me dangling? Oh, that’s over.”
     “And are you married – has it come off?” the old man asked, eagerly. “How long have I been ill?”
     “We are uncomfortable, unreasonable people, not deserving of your interest. We are not married,” Nick said.
     “Then I haven’t been ill so long,” Mr Carteret sighed, with vague relief.
     “Not very long – but things are different,” Nick continued.
     The old man’s eyes rested on his, and Nick noted how much larger they appeared. “You mean the arrangements are made – the day is at hand?”
     “There are no arrangements,” Nick smiled: “but why should it trouble you?”
     “What then will you do – without arrangements?” Mr Carteret’s inquiry was plaintive and childlike.
     “We shall do nothing – there is nothing to be done. We are not to be married – it’s all off,” said Nick. Then he added: “Mrs Dallow has gone abroad.”
     The old man, motionless among his pillows, gave a long groan. “Ah, I don’t like that.”
     “No more do I, sir.”
     “What’s the matter? It was so good – so good.”
     “It wasn’t good enough for her,” Nick Dormer declared.
     “For her? Is she so great as that? She told me she had the greatest regard for you. You’re good enough for the best, my dear boy,” Mr Carteret went on.
     “You don’t know me; I am disappointing. Mrs Dallow had, I believe, a great regard for me; but I have forfeited her regard.”
     The old man stared at this cynical announcement: he searched his companion’s face for some attenuation of the words. But Nick apparently struck him as unashamed; and a faint colour coming into his withered cheek indicated his mystification and alarm. “Have you been unfaithful to her?” he demanded, considerately.
     “She thinks so – it comes to the same thing. As I told you a year ago, she doesn’t believe in me.”
     “You ought to have made her – you ought to have made her,” said Mr Carteret. Nick was about to utter some rejoinder when he continued: “Do you remember what I told you I would give you if you did? Do you remember what I told you I would give you on your wedding-day?”
     “You expressed the most generous intentions; and I remember them as much as a man may do who has no wish to remind you of them.”
     “The money is there – I have put it aside.”
     “I haven’t earned it – I haven’t earned a penny of it. Give it to those who deserve it more.”
     “I don’t understand – I don’t understand,” Mr Carteret murmured, with the tears of weakness coming into his eyes. His face flushed and he added: “I’m not good for much discussion; I’m very much disappointed.”
     “I think I may say it’s not my fault – I have done what I can,” returned Nick.
     “But when people are in love they do more than that.”
     “Oh, it’s all over!” Nick exclaimed; not caring much now, for the moment, how disconcerted his companion might be, so long as he disabused him of the idea that they were partners to a bargain. “We’ve tormented each other and we’ve tormented you; and that is all that has come of it.”
     “Don’t you care for what I would have done for you – shouldn’t you have liked it?”
     “Of course one likes kindness – one likes money. But it’s all over,” Nick repeated. Then he added: “I fatigue you, I knock you up, with telling you these uncomfortable things. I only do so because it seems to me right you should know. But don’t be worried – everything will be all right.”
     He patted his companion’s hand reassuringly, he leaned over him affectionately; but Mr Carteret was not easily soothed. He had practised lucidity all his life, he had expected it of others and he had never given his assent to an indistinct proposition. He was weak, but he was not too weak to perceive that he had formed a calculation which was now vitiated by a wrong factor – put his name to a contract of which the other side had not been carried out. More than fifty years of conscious success pressed him to try to understand; he had never muddled his affairs and he couldn’t muddle them now. At the same time he was aware of the necessity of economizing his effort, and he evidently gathered himself, within, patiently and almost cunningly, for the right question and the right induction. He was still able to make his agitation reflective, and it could still consort with his high hopes of Nick that he should find himself regarding the declaration that everything would be all right as an inadequate guarantee. So, after he had looked a moment into his companion’s eyes, he inquired:
     “Have you done anything bad?”
     “Nothing worse than usual,” laughed Nick.
     “Everything should have been better than usual.”
     “Ah, well, it hasn’t been that – that I must say.”
     “Do you sometimes think of your father?” Mr Carteret continued.
     Nick hesitated a moment. “You make me think of him – you have always that pleasant effect.”
     “His name would have lived – it mustn’t be lost.”
     “Yes, but the competition to-day is terrible,” Nick replied.
     Mr Carteret considered this a moment, as if he found a serious flaw in it; after which he began again: “I never supposed you were a trifler.”
     “I’m determined not to be.”
     “I thought her charming. Don’t you love her?” Mr Carteret asked.
     “Don’t ask me that to-day, for I feel sore and resentful. I don’t think she has treated me well.”
     “You should have held her – you shouldn’t have let her go,” the old man returned, with unexpected fire.
     His companion flushed at this, so strange it seemed to him to receive a lesson in energy from a dying octogenarian. Yet after an instant Nick answered modestly enough: “I haven’t been clever enough, no doubt.”
     “Don’t say that – don’t say that,” Mr Carteret murmured, looking almost frightened. “Don’t think I can allow you any mitigation of that sort. I know how well you’ve done. You’re taking your place. Several gentlemen have told me. Hasn’t she felt a scruple, knowing my settlement on you was contingent?” he pursued.
     “Oh, she hasn’t known – hasn’t known anything about it.”
     “I don’t understand; though I think you explained somewhat a year ago,” Mr Carteret said, with discouragement. “I think she wanted to speak to me – of any intentions I might have in regard to you – the day she was here. Very nicely, very properly she would have done it, I’m sure. I think her idea was that I ought to make any settlement quite independent of your marrying her or not marrying her. But I tried to convey to her – I don’t know whether she understood me – that I liked her too much for that, I wanted too much to make sure of her.”
     “To make sure of me, you mean,” said Nick. “And now, after all, you see you haven’t.”
     “Well, perhaps it was that,” sighed the old man, confusedly.
     “All this is very bad for you – we’ll talk again,” Nick rejoined.
     “No, no – let us finish it now. I like to know what I’m doing. I shall rest better when I do know. There are great things to be done; the future will be full – the future will be fine,” Mr Carteret wandered.
     “Let me say this for Julia: that if we hadn’t been sundered her generosity to me would have been complete, she would have put her great fortune absolutely at my disposal,” Nick said, after a moment. “Her consciousness of all that naturally carries her over any particular distress in regard to what won’t come to me now from another source.”
     “Ah, don’t lose it,” pleaded the old man, painfully.
     “It’s in your hands, sir,” reasoned Nick.
     “I mean Mrs Dallow’s fortune. It will be of the highest utility. That was what your father missed.”
     “I shall miss more than my father did,” said Nick.
     “She’ll come back to you – I can’t look at you and doubt that.”
     Nick shook his head slowly, smiling. “Never, never, never! You look at me, my grand old friend, but you don’t see me. I’m not what you think.”
     “What is it – what is it? Have you been bad?” Mr Carteret panted.
     “No, no; I’m not bad. But I’m different.”
     “Different?”
     “Different from my father – different from Mrs Dallow – different from you.”
     “Ah, why do you perplex me?” moaned the old man. “You’ve done something.”
     “I don’t want to perplex you, but I have done something,” said Nick, getting up.
     He had heard the door open softly behind him and Mrs Lendon come forward with precautions. “What has he done – what has he done?” quavered Mr Carteret to his sister, She however, after a glance at the patient, motioned Nick away and, bending over the bed, replied in a voice expressive at that moment of a sharply contrasted plenitude of vital comfort:
     “He has only excited you, I’m afraid, a little more than is good for you. Isn’t your dear old head a little too high?” Nick regarded himself as justly banished and he quitted the room with a ready acquiescence in any power to carry on the scene of which Mrs Lendon might find herself possessed. He felt distinctly brutal as he heard his host emit a soft, troubled exhalation of assent to some change of position. But he would have reproached himself more if he had wished less to guard against the acceptance of an equivalent for duties unperformed. Mr Carteret had had in his mind, characteristically, the idea of an enlightened agreement, and there was something more to be said about that.
     Nick went out of the house and stayed away for two or three hours, quite ready to consider that the place was quieter and safer without him. He haunted the abbey, as usual, and sat a long time in its simplifying stillness, turning over many things. He came into the house again at the luncheon-hour, through the garden, and heard, somewhat to his surprise and greatly to his relief, that Mr Carteret had composed himself promptly enough after their agitating interview. Mrs Lendon talked at luncheon much as if she expected her brother to be, as she said, really quite fit again. She asked Nick no embarrassing question; which was uncommonly good of her, he thought, considering that she might have said: “What in the world were you trying to get out of him?” She only told our young man that the invalid had very little doubt he should be able to see him again, about half-past seven, for a very short time: this timid emphasis was Mrs Lendon’s single tribute to the critical spirit. Nick divined that Mr Carteret’s desire for further explanations was really strong and had been capable of sustaining him through a bad morning – capable even of helping him (it would be a secret and wonderful momentary victory over his weakness) to pass it off for a good one. He wished he might make a sketch of him from the life, as he had seen him after breakfast; he had a conviction he could make a strong one, and it would be a precious memento. But he shrank from proposing this – Mr Carteret might think it unparliamentary. The doctor had called while Nick was out, and he came again at five o’clock, without our young man’s seeing him. Nick was busy in his room at that hour: he wrote a short letter which took him a long time. But apparently there had been no veto on a resumption of talk, for at half-past seven the old man sent for him. The nurse, at the door, said: “Only a moment, I hope, sir?” but she took him in and then withdrew.
     The prolonged daylight was in the room, and Mr Carteret was again established on his pile of pillows, but with his head a little lower. Nick sat down by him and began to express the hope that he had not upset him in the morning; but the old man, with fixed, expanded eyes, took up their conversation exactly where they had left it.
     “What have you done – what have you done? Have you associated yourself with some other woman?”
     “No, no; I don’t think she can accuse me of that.”
     “Well, then, she’ll come back to you, if you take the right way with her.”
     It might have been droll to hear Mr Carteret, in his situation, giving his views on the right way with women; but Nick was not moved to enjoy that diversion. “I’ve taken the wrong way. I’ve done something which will spoil my prospects in that direction for ever. I’ve written a letter,” Nick went on; but his companion had already interrupted him.
     “You’ve written a letter?”
     “To my constituents, informing them of my determination to resign my seat.”
     “To resign your seat?”
     “I’ve made up my mind, after no end of reflection, dear Mr Carteret, to work in a different line. I have a project of becoming a painter. So I’ve given up the idea of a political life.”
     “A painter?” Mr Carteret seemed to turn whiter.
     “I’m going in for the portrait in oils: it sounds absurd, I know, and I only mention it to show you that I don’t in the least expect you to count upon me.” Mr Carteret had continued to stare, at first; then his eyes slowly closed and he lay motionless and blank. “Don’t let it trouble you now; it’s a long story and rather a poor one; when you get better I’ll tell you all about it. We’ll talk it over amicably, and I’ll bring you to my side,” Nick went on hypocritically. He had laid his hand on Mr Carteret’s again: it felt cold, and as the old man remained silent he had a moment of exaggerated fear.
     “This is dreadful news,” said Mr Carteret, opening his eyes.
     “Certainly it must seem so to you, for I’ve always kept from you (I was ashamed, and my present confusion is a just chastisement) the great interest I have always taken in the” – Nick hesitated, and then added, with an intention of humour and a sense of foolishness – “in the pencil and the brush.” He spoke of his present confusion; but it must be confessed that his manner showed it but little. He was surprised at his own serenity, and had to recognize that at the point things had come to now he was profoundly obstinate and quiet.
     “The pencil – the brush? They’re not the weapons of a gentleman,” said Mr Carteret.
     “I was sure that would be your view. I repeat that I mention them only because you once said you intended to do something for me, as the phrase is, and I thought you oughtn’t to do it in ignorance.”
     “My ignorance was better. Such knowledge isn’t good for me.”
     “Forgive me, my dear old friend. When you’re better you’ll see it differently.”
     “I shall never be better now.”
     “Ah, no,” pleaded Nick, “it will do you good after a little. Think it over quietly and you’ll be glad I’ve stopped being a humbug.”
     “I loved you – I loved you as my son,” moaned the old man.
     Nick sank on his knee beside the bed and leaned over him tenderly. “Get better, get better, and I’ll be your son for the rest of your life.”
     “Poor Dormer – poor Dormer!” Mr Carteret softly wailed.
     “I admit that if he had lived I probably shouldn’t have done it,” said Nick. “I dare say I should have deferred to his prejudices, even if I thought them narrow.”
     “Do you turn against your father?” Mr Carteret asked, making, to disengage his arm from the young man’s touch, an effort in which Nick recognized the irritation of conscious weakness. Nick got up, at this, and stood a moment looking down at him, while Mr Carteret went on: “Do you give up your name, do you give up your country?”
     “If I do something good my country may like it,” Nick contended.
     “Do you regard them as equal, the two glories?”
     “Here comes your nurse, to blow me up and turn me out,” said Nick.
     The nurse had come in, but Mr Carteret managed to direct to her an audible, dry, courteous “Be so good as to wait till I send for you,” which arrested her, in the large room, at some distance from the bed, and then had the effect of making her turn on her heel with a professional laugh. She appeared to think that an old gentleman with the fine manner of his prime might still be trusted to take care of himself. When she had gone Mr Carteret went on, addressing Nick, with the inquiry for which his deep displeasure lent him strength: “Do you pretend there is a nobler life than a high political career?”
     “I think the noble life is doing one’s work well. One can do it very ill and be very base and mean in what you call a high political career. I haven’t been in the House so many months without finding that out. It contains some very small souls.”
     “You should stand against them – you should expose them!” stammered Mr Carteret.
     “Stand against them – against one’s own party?”
     The old man looked bewildered a moment at this; then he broke out: “God forgive you, are you a Tory – are you a Tory?”
     “How little you understand me!” laughed Nick, with a ring of bitterness.
     “Little enough – little enough, my boy. Have you sent your electors your dreadful letter?”
     “Not yet; but it’s ready, and I sha’n’t change my mind.”
     “You will – you will; you’ll think better of it, you’ll see your duty,” said the old man, almost coaxingly.
     “That seems very improbable, for my determination, crudely and abruptly as, to my regret, it comes to you here, is the fruit of a long and painful struggle. The difficulty is that I see my duty just in this other effort.”
     “An effort? Do you call it an effort to fall away, to sink far down, to give up every effort? What does your mother say, heaven help her?” Mr Carteret pursued, before Nick could answer the other question.
     “I haven’t told her yet.”
     “You’re ashamed, you’re ashamed!” Nick only looked out of the western window at this; he felt himself growing red. “Tell her it would have been sixty thousand; I had the money all ready.”
     “I sha’n’t tell her that,” said Nick, redder still.
     “Poor woman – poor dear woman!” Mr Carteret whimpered.
     “Yes, indeed; she won’t like it.”
     “Think it all over again; don’t throw away a splendid future!” These words were uttered with a recovering flicker of passion. Nick Dormer had never heard such an accent on his old friend’s lips. But the next instant Mr Carteret began to murmur: “I’m tired – I’m very tired,” and sank back with a groan and with closed lips.
     Nick assured him tenderly that he had only too much cause to be exhausted, but that the worst was over now. He smoothed his pillows for him and said he must leave him, he would send in the nurse.
     “Come back – come back,” Mr Carteret pleaded before he quitted him; “come back and tell me it’s a horrible dream.”
     Nick did go back, very late that evening; Mr Carteret had sent a message to his room. But one of the nurses was on the ground this time and she remained there with her watch in her hand. The invalid’s chamber was shrouded and darkened; the shaded candle left the bed in gloom. Nick’s interview with his venerable host was the affair of but a moment; the nurse interposed, impatient and not understanding. She heard Nick tell Mr Carteret that he had posted his letter now, and Mr Carteret flashed out, with an acerbity which savoured still of the sordid associations of a world he had not done with: “Then of course my settlement doesn’t take effect!”
     “Oh, that’s all right,” Nick answered, kindly; and he went off the next morning by the early train – his injured host still sleeping. Mrs Lendon’s habits made it easy for her to be present in matutinal bloom at the young man’s hasty breakfast, and she sent a particular remembrance to Lady Agnes and (when Nick should see them) to the Ladies Flora and Elizabeth. Nick had a prevision of the spirit in which his mother at least would now receive hollow compliments from Beauclere.
     The night before, as soon as he had quitted Mr Carteret, the old man said to the nurse that he wished her to tell Mr Chayter that, the first thing in the morning, he must go and fetch Mr Mitton. Mr Mitton was the first solicitor at Beauclere.

34

     The really formidable thing for Nick was to tell his mother: a truth of which he was so conscious that he had the matter out with her the very morning he returned from Beauclere. She and Grace had come back the afternoon before from Lady St Dunstans’, and knowing this (she had written him her intention from the country), he drove straight from the station to Calcutta Gardens. There was a little room there, on the right of the house-door, which was known as his own room, but in which of a morning, when he was not at home, Lady Agnes sometimes wrote her letters. These were always numerous, and when she heard our young man’s cab she happened to be engaged with them at the big brass-mounted bureau which had belonged to his father, where, behind an embankment of works of political reference, she seemed to herself to make public affairs feel the point of her elbow.
     She came into the hall to meet her son and to hear about Mr Carteret, and Nick went straight back into the room with her and closed the door. It would be in the evening paper and she would see it, and he had no right to allow her to wait for that. It proved indeed a terrible hour; and when, ten minutes later, Grace, who learned up-stairs that her brother had come back, went down for further news of him she heard from the hall a sound of voices which made her first pause and then retrace her steps on tiptoe. She mounted to the drawing-room and crept about there, palpitating, looking at moments into the dull street and wondering what on earth was going on. She had no one to express her wonder to, for Florence Tressilian had departed and Biddy, after breakfast, had betaken herself, in accordance with a custom now inveterate, to Rosedale Road. Her mother was crying passionately – a circumstance tremendous in its significance, for Lady Agnes had not often been brought so low. Nick had seen her cry, but this almost awful spectacle had seldom been given to Grace; and it forced her to believe at present that some dreadful thing had happened.
     That was of course in order, after Nick’s mysterious quarrel with Julia, which had made his mother so ill and which now apparently had been followed up with new horrors. The row, as Grace mentally phrased it, had had something to do with this incident, some deeper depth of disappointment had opened up. Grace asked herself if they were talking about Broadwood; if Nick had demanded that, in the conditions so unpleasantly altered, Lady Agnes should restore that pretty property to its owner. This was very possible, but why should he so suddenly have broken out about it? And moreover their mother, though sore to bleeding about the whole business – for Broadwood, in its fresh comfort, was too delightful – would not have met this pretension with tears, inasmuch as she had already declared that they couldn’t decently continue to make use of the place. Julia had said of course they must go on, but Lady Agnes was prepared with an effective rejoinder to this. It didn’t consist of words – it was to be austerely practical, was to consist of letting Julia see, at the moment she should least expect it, that they quite wouldn’t go on. Lady Agnes was ostensibly waiting for that moment – the moment when her renunciation would be most impressive.
     Grace was conscious of how, for many days, her mother and she had been moving in darkness, deeply stricken by Nick’s culpable (oh, he was culpable!) loss of his prize, but feeling there was an element in the matter they didn’t grasp, an undiscovered explanation which would perhaps make it still worse, though it might make them a little better. Nick had explained nothing; he had simply said: “Dear mother, we don’t hit it off, after all; it’s an awful bore, but we don’t,” as if that were, under the circumstances, an adequate balm for two aching hearts. From Julia, naturally, satisfying attenuations were not to be looked for; and though Julia very often did the thing you wouldn’t suppose she was not unexpectedly apologetic in this case. Grace recognized that in such a position it would savour of apology for her to impart to Lady Agnes her grounds for letting Nick off; and she would not have liked to be the person to suggest to Julia that any one looked for anything from her. Neither of the disunited pair blamed the other or cast an aspersion, and it was all very magnanimous and superior and impenetrable and exasperating. With all this Grace had a suspicion that Biddy knew something more, that for Biddy the tormenting curtain had been lifted.
     Biddy came and went in these days with a perceptible air of detachment from the tribulations of home. It made her fortunately very pretty – still prettier than usual; it sometimes happened that at moments when Grace was most angry she had a faint, sweet smile which might have been drawn from a source of private consolation. It was perhaps in some degree connected with Peter Sherringham’s visit, as to which the girl was not silent. When Grace asked her if she had secret information and if it pointed to the idea that everything would be all right in the end, she pretended to know nothing (What should she know? she asked, with the loveliest candour), and begged her sister not to let Lady Agnes believe that she was any better off than they. She contributed nothing to their gropings towards the light save a better patience than theirs, but she went with noticeable regularity, on the pretext of her foolish modelling, to Rosedale Road. She was frankly on Nick’s side; not going so far as to say he had been right, but saying distinctly that she was sure that, whatever had happened, he couldn’t help it. This was striking, because, as Grace knew, the younger of the sisters had been much favoured by Julia and would not have sacrificed her easily. It associated itself in the irritated mind of the elder with Biddy’s frequent visits to the studio and made Miss Dormer ask herself whether the crisis in Nick’s and Julia’s business had not somehow been linked to that unnatural spot.
     She had gone there two or three times while Biddy was working, to pick up any clue to the mystery that might peep out. But she had put her hand upon nothing, save once on the personality of Gabriel Nash. She found this strange creature, to her surprise, paying a visit to her sister – he had come for Nick, who was absent: she remembered how they had met him in Paris and how he had frightened her. When she asked Biddy afterwards how she could receive him that way Biddy replied that even she, Grace, would have some charity for him if she could hear how fond he was of poor Nick. He talked to her only of Nick – of nothing else. Grace observed how she spoke of Nick as injured, and noted the implication that some one else had ceased to be fond of him and was thereby condemned in Biddy’s eyes. It seemed to Grace that some one else had at least a right not to like some of his friends. The studio struck her as mean and horrid; and so far from suggesting to her that it could have played a part in making Nick and Julia fall out, she only felt how little its dusty want of consequence could count one way or the other for Julia. Grace, who had opinions on art, saw no merit whatever in those ‘impressions’ on canvas, from Nick’s hand, with which the place was bestrewn. She didn’t wish her brother to have talent in that direction; yet it was secretly humiliating to her that he had not more.
     Nick felt a pang of almost horrified penitence, in the little room on the right of the hall, the moment after he had made his mother really understand that he had thrown up his seat and it would probably be in the evening papers. That she would take it badly was an idea that had pressed upon him hard enough; but she took it even worse than he had feared. He measured, in the look that she gave him when the full truth loomed upon her, the mortal cruelty of her discomfiture: her face was like that of a passenger on a ship who sees the huge bows of another vessel towering close out of the fog. There are visions of dismay before which the best conscience recoils; and though Nick had made his choice on all the grounds there were a few minutes in which he would gladly have admitted that his wisdom was a dark mistake. His heart was in his throat, he had gone too far; he had been ready to disappoint his mother – he had not been ready to destroy her.
     Lady Agnes, I hasten to add, was not destroyed; she made, after her first drowning gasp, a tremendous scene of opposition, in the face of which Nick speedily fell back upon his intrenchments. She must know the worst, he had thought; so he told her everything, including the little story of the forfeiture of his ‘expectations’ from Mr Carteret. He showed her this time not only the face of the matter but what lay below it; narrated briefly the incident in his studio which had led to Julia Dallow’s deciding that she couldn’t after all put up with him. This was wholly new to Lady Agnes; she had had no clue to it, and he could instantly see how it made the case worse for her, adding a hideous positive to an abominable negative. He perceived now that, distressed and distracted as she had been by his rupture with Julia, she had still held to the faith that their engagement would come on again; believing evidently that he had a personal empire over the mistress of Harsh which would bring her back. Lady Agnes was forced to recognize that empire as precarious, to forswear the hope of a blessed renewal, from the moment it was a question of base infatuations on his own part. Nick confessed to an infatuation but did his best to show her it was not base; that it was not (since Julia had had faith in his loyalty) for the person of the young lady who had been discovered posturing to him and whom he had seen but half a dozen times in his life. He endeavoured to give his mother a notion of who this young lady was and to remind her of the occasion, in Paris, when they all had seen her together. But Lady Agnes’s mind and memory were a blank on the subject of Miss Miriam Rooth, and she wanted to know nothing whatever about her: it was enough that she was the cause of their ruin, that she was mixed up with his unspeakable folly. Her ladyship needed to know nothing of Miss Rooth to allude to her as if it were superfluous to give a definite name to the class to which she belonged.
     But she gave a name to the group in which Nick had now taken his place, and it made him feel, after the lapse of years, like a small blamed, sorry boy again; for it was so far away he could scarcely remember it (besides there having been but a moment or two of that sort in his happy childhood), the time when his mother had slapped him and called him a little fool. He was a big fool now – a huge, immeasurable one; she repeated the term over and over, with high-pitched passion. The most painful thing in this painful hour was perhaps his glimpse of the strange feminine cynicism that lurked in her fine sense of injury. Where there was such a complexity of revolt it would have been difficult to pick out particular complaints; but Nick could see that to Lady Agnes’s imagination he was most a fool for not having kept his relations with the actress, whatever they were, better from Julia’s knowledge. He remained indeed freshly surprised at the ardour with which she had rested her hopes on Julia. Julia was certainly a combination – she was fascinating, she was a sort of leading woman and she was rich; but after all (putting aside what she might be to a man in love with her), she was not the keystone of the universe. Yet the form in which the consequences of his apostasy appeared most to come home to Lady Agnes was the loss, for the Dormer family, of the advantages attached to the possession of Mrs Dallow. The larger mortification would round itself later; for the hour the damning thing was that Nick had really made Julia a present of an unforgivable grievance. He had clinched their separation by his letter to his electors; and that above all was the wickedness of the letter. Julia would have got over the other woman, but she would never get over his becoming a nobody.
     Lady Agnes challenged him upon this low prospect exactly as if he embraced it with the malignant purpose of making Julia’s return impossible. She contradicted her premises and lost her way in her wrath. What had made him suddenly turn round if he had been in good faith before? He had never been in good faith – never, never; he had had from his earliest childhood the nastiest hankerings after a vulgar little daubing, trash-talking life; they were not in him, the grander, nobler aspirations – they never had been – and he had been anything but honest to lead her on, to lead them all on, to think he would do something: the fall and the shame would have been less for them if they had come earlier. Moreover, what need under heaven had he to tell Charles Carteret of his cruel folly on his very death-bed? – as if he mightn’t have let it all alone and accepted the benefit the old man was so delighted to confer. No wonder the old man would keep his money for his heirs, if that was the way Nick proposed to repay him; but where was the common sense, where was the common charity, where was the common decency, of tormenting him with such vile news in his last hours? Was he trying what he could invent that would break her heart, that would send her in sorrow down to her grave? Weren’t they all miserable enough, and hadn’t he a ray of pity for his wretched sisters?
     The relation of effect and cause, in regard to his sisters’ wretchedness, was but dimly discernible to Nick, who however easily perceived that his mother genuinely considered that his action had disconnected them all, still more than she held they were already disconnected, from the good things of life. Julia was money, Mr Carteret was money, and everything else was poverty. If these precious people had been primarily money for Nick, it was after all a gracious tribute to his distributive power to have taken for granted that for the rest of the family too the difference would have been so great. For days, for weeks and months afterward the little room on the right of the hall seemed to our young man to vibrate, as if the very walls and window-panes still suffered, with the most disagreeable ordeal he had ever been through.

     That evening – the evening of his return from Beauclere – Nick was conscious of a keen desire to get away, to go abroad, to leave behind him the little chatter his resignation would be sure to produce in an age of publicity which never discriminated as to the quality of events. Then he felt it was better to stay, to see the business through on the spot. Besides, he would have to meet his constituents (would a parcel of cheese-eating burgesses ever have been ‘met’ on so queer an occasion?) and when that was over the worst would be over. Nick had an idea that he knew in advance how it would feel to be pointed at as a person who had given up a considerable chance of eventual ‘office’ to take likenesses at so much a head. He wouldn’t attempt, down at Harsh, to touch on the question of motive; for, given the nature of the public mind of Harsh, that would be a strain on his faculty of expression. But as regards the chaff of the political world and of society he had an idea he should find chaff enough for answers. It was true that when his mother chaffed him in her own effective way he had felt rather flattened out; but then one’s mother might have a heavier hand than any one else.
     He had not thrown up the House of Commons to amuse himself; he had thrown it up to work, to sit quietly down and bend over his task. If he should go abroad his mother might think he had some weak-minded view of joining Julia Dallow and trying, with however little hope, to win her back – an illusion it would be singularly pernicious to encourage. His desire for Julia’s society had succumbed, for the present at any rate, to an irresistible interruption – he had become more and more conscious that they spoke a different language. Nick felt like a young man who has gone to the Rhineland to ‘get up’ his German for an examination – committed to talk, to read, to dream only in the new idiom. Now that he had taken his jump everything was simplified, at the same time that everything was pitched in a higher, more excited key; and he wondered how in the absence of a common dialect he had conversed on the whole so happily with Julia. Then he had after-tastes of understandings tolerably independent of words. He was excited because every fresh responsibility is exciting, and there was no manner of doubt that he had accepted one. No one knew what it was but himself (Gabriel Nash scarcely counted – his whole attitude on the question of responsibility was so wanton), and he would have to ask his dearest friends to take him on trust. Rather, he would ask nothing of any one, but would cultivate independence, mulishness and gaiety and fix his thoughts on a bright if distant morrow. It was disagreeable to have to remember that his task would not be sweetened by a sense of heroism; for if it might be heroic to give up the muses for the strife of great affairs, no romantic glamour worth speaking of would ever gather round an Englishman who in the prime of his strength had given up great or even small affairs for the muses. Such an original might himself privately, perversely regard certain phases of this inferior commerce as a great affair; but who would give him the benefit of that sort of confidence – except indeed a faithful, clever, excited little sister Biddy, if he should have the good luck to have one? Biddy was in fact all ready for heroic flights and eager to think she might fight the battle of the beautiful by her brother’s side; so that Nick had really to moderate her and remind her that his actual job was not a crusade, with bugles and banners, but a gray, sedentary grind, whose charm was all at the core. You might have an emotion about it, and an emotion that would be a help, but this was not the sort of thing you could show – the end in view would seem ridiculously small for it. Nick asked Biddy how one could talk to people about the ‘responsibility’ of what she would see him pottering at in his studio.
     Nick therefore didn’t talk any more than he was forced to, having moreover a sense that that side of the situation would be plentifully looked after by Gabriel Nash. He left the burden of explanation to others, meeting them on the ground of inexhaustible satire. He saw that he should live for months in a thick cloud of irony, not the finest air of the season, and he adopted the weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts when everyone else produces a cigar – he puffed the empirical, defensive cigarette. He accepted the idea of a mystery in his behaviour and abounded so in that sense that his critics were themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase is, little out of him – he rose in his good-humour so much higher than the ‘rise’ they had looked for – on his very first encounter with the world after his scrimmage with his mother. He went to a dinner-party (he had accepted the invitation many days before), having seen his resignation, in the form of a telegram from Harsh, announced in the evening papers. The people he found there had seen it as well, and the most imaginative of them wanted to know what he was going to do. Even the least imaginative asked if it were true he had changed his politics. He gave different answers to different persons, but left most of them under the impression that he had remarkable conscientious scruples. This however was not a formidable occasion, for there happened to be no one present he was particularly fond of. There were old friends whom it would not be so easy to satisfy – Nick was almost sorry, for an hour, that he had so many old friends. If he had had more enemies the case would have been simpler; and he was fully aware that the hardest thing of all would be to be let off too easily. Then he would appear to himself to have been put on his generosity, and his deviation would wear its ugliest face.
     When he left the place at which he had been dining he betook himself to Rosedale Road: he saw no reason why he should go down to the House, though he knew he had not done with that yet. He had a dread of behaving as if he supposed he should be expected to make a farewell speech, and was thankful his eminence was not of a nature to create on such an occasion a demand for his oratory. He had in fact nothing whatever to say in public – not a word, not a syllable. Though the hour was late he found Gabriel Nash established in his studio, drawn thither by the fine exhilaration of having seen an evening paper. Trying it late, on the chance, he had been told by Nick’s servant that Nick would sleep there that night, and he had come in to wait, he was so eager to congratulate him. Nick submitted with a good grace to his society – he was tired enough to go to bed, but he was restless too – in spite of feeling now, oddly enough, that Nash’s congratulations could add little to his fortitude. He had felt a good deal, before, as if he were in Nash’s hands; but now that he had made his final choice he seemed to himself to be altogether in his own. Gabriel was wonderful, but no Gabriel could assist him much henceforth.
     Gabriel was indeed more wonderful than ever, while he lolled on a divan and emitted a series of reflections which were even more ingenious than opportune. Nick walked up and down the room, and it might have been supposed from his manner that he was impatient for his visitor to withdraw. This idea would have been contradicted however by the fact that subsequently, after Nash had taken leave, he continued to perambulate. He had grown used to Nash – had a sense that he had heard all he had to say. That was one’s penalty with persons whose main gift was for talk, however irrigating; talk engendered a sense of sameness much sooner than action. The things a man did were necessarily more different from each other than the things he said, even if he went in for surprising you. Nick felt Nash could never surprise him any more save by doing something.
     He talked of his host’s future, he talked of Miriam Rooth and of Peter Sherringham, whom he had seen at Miriam Rooth’s and whom he described as in a predicament delightful to behold. Nick asked a question or two about Peter’s predicament and learned rather to his disappointment that it consisted only of the fact that he was in love with Miriam. He requested his visitor to do better than this; whereupon Nash added the touch that Sherringham wouldn’t be able to have her. “Oh, they have ideas!” he said, when Nick asked him why.
     “What ideas? So has he, I suppose.”
     “Yes, but they’re not the same.”
     “Oh well, they’ll arrange something,” said Nick.
     “You’ll have to help them a bit. She’s in love with another man,” Nash returned.
     “Do you mean with you?”
     “Oh, I’m never another man,” said Nash; “I’m more the wrong one than the man himself. It’s you she’s after.” And upon Nick’s asking him what he meant by this he added: “While you were engaged in transferring her image to your sensorium you stamped your own upon hers.”
     Nick stopped in his walk, staring. “Ah, what a bore!”
     “A bore? Don’t you think she’s agreeable?”
     Nick hesitated. “I wanted to go on with her – now I can’t.”
     “My dear fellow, it only makes her handsomer: I wondered what was the matter with her.”
     “Oh, that’s twaddle,” said Nick, turning away. “Besides, has she told you?”
     “No, but her mother has.”
     “Has she told her mother?”
     “Mrs Rooth says not. But I have known Mrs Rooth to say that which isn’t.”
     “Apply that rule then to the information you speak of.”
     “Well, since you press me, I know more,” said Nash. “Miriam knows you are engaged to a certain lady; she told me as much, told me she had seen her here. That was enough to set Miriam off – she likes forbidden fruit.”
     “I’m not engaged to any lady. I was, but we’ve altered our minds.”
     “Ah, what a pity!” sighed Nash.
     “Mephistopheles!” Nick rejoined, stopping again and looking at his visitor gravely.
     “Pray, whom do you call Margaret? May I ask if your failure of interest in the political situation is the cause of this change in your personal one?” Nash went on. Nick signified to him that he might not; whereupon Gabriel added: “I am not in the least devilish – I only mean it’s a pity you’ve altered your minds, because now perhaps Miriam will alter hers. She goes from one thing to another. However, I won’t tell her.”
     “I will, then,” said Nick, between jest and earnest.
     “Would that really be prudent?” Nash asked, with an intonation that made hilarity prevail.
     “At any rate,” Nick resumed, “nothing would induce me to interfere with Peter Sherringham. That sounds fatuous, but to you I don’t mind appearing an ass.”
     “The thing would be to get Sherringham – out of spite – to entangle himself with another woman.”
     “What good would that do?”
     “Oh, Miriam would begin to fancy him then.”
     “Spite surely isn’t a conceivable motive – for a healthy man.”
     “Ah, Sherringham isn’t a healthy man. He’s too much in love.”
     “Then he won’t care for another woman.”
     “He would try to, and that would produce its effect – its effect on Miriam.”
     “You talk like an American novel. Let him try, and God keep us all straight.” Nick thought, in extreme silence, of his poor little Biddy and hoped – he would have to see to it a little – that Peter wouldn’t ‘try’ on her. He changed the subject and before Nash went away took occasion to remark to him – the occasion was offered by some new allusion of the visitor’s to the sport he hoped to extract from seeing Nick carry out everything to which he stood committed – that the great comedy would fall very flat, the great incident would pass unnoticed.
     “Oh, if you’ll simply do your part I’ll take care of the rest,” said Nash.
     “If you mean by doing my part working like a beaver, it’s all right,” Nick replied.
     “Ah, you reprobate, you’ll become a fashionable painter, a P.R.A.!” his companion groaned, getting up to go.
     When he had gone Nick threw himself back on the cushions of the divan and, with his hands locked above his head, sat a long time lost in thought. He had sent his servant to bed; he was unmolested. He gazed before him into the gloom produced by the unheeded burning out of the last candle. The vague outer light came in through the tall studio window, and the painted images, ranged about, looked confused in the dusk. If his mother had seen him she might have thought he was staring at his father’s ghost.

     The night Peter Sherringham walked away from Balaklava Place with Gabriel Nash the talk of the two men directed itself, as was natural under the circumstances, to the question of Miriam’s future renown and the pace, as Nash called it, at which she would go. Critical spirits as they both were, and one of them as dissimulative in passion as the other was paradoxical in the absence of it, they yet took this renown for granted as completely as the simple-minded, a pair of hot spectators in the pit, might have done, and exchanged observations on the assumption that the only uncertain element would be the pace. This was a proof of general subjugation. Peter wished not to show, but he wished to know; and in the restlessness of his anxiety he was ready even to risk exposure, great as the sacrifice might be of the imperturbable, urbane scepticism most appropriate to a secretary of embassy. He was unable to rid himself of the sense that Gabriel Nash had got up earlier than he, had had opportunities in days already distant, the days of Mrs Rooth’s hungry foreign rambles. Something of authority and privilege stuck to him from this, and it made Sherringham still more uncomfortable when he was most conscious that at the best even the trained diplomatic mind would never get a grasp of Miriam as a whole. She was constructed to revolve like the terrestrial globe; some part or other of her was always out of sight or in shadow.
     Sherringham talked to conceal his feelings and, like every man doing a thing from that sort of intention, did it perhaps too much. They agreed that, putting strange accidents aside, Miriam would go further than any one had gone, in England at least and within the memory of man; and that it was a pity, as regards marking the comparison, that for so long no one had gone any distance worth speaking of. They further agreed that it would naturally seem absurd to any one who didn’t know, their prophesying such big things on such small evidence; and they agreed lastly that the absurdity quite vanished as soon as the prophets knew as they knew. Their knowledge (they quite recognized this) was simply confidence raised to a high point – the communication of the girl’s own confidence. The conditions were enormously to make, but it was of the very essence of Miriam’s confidence that she would make them. The parts, the plays, the theatres, the ‘support’, the audiences, the critics, the money were all to be found, but she cast a spell which prevented that from seeming a serious hitch. One might not see from one day to the other what she would do or how she would do it, but she would none the less go on. She would have to construct her own road, as it were, but at the worst there would only be delays in making it. These delays would depend on the hardness of the stones she had to break.
     As Sherringham had perceived, you never knew where to ‘have’ Gabriel Nash; a truth exemplified in his unexpected delight at the prospect of Miriam’s drawing forth the modernness of the age. You might have thought he would loathe that modernness; but he had a brilliant, amused, amusing vision of it, saw it as something huge and ornamentally vulgar. It’s vulgarity would rise to the grand style, like that of a London railway station, and Miriam’s publicity would be as big as the globe itself. All the machinery was ready, the platform laid; the facilities, the wires and bells and trumpets, the colossal, deafening newspaperism of the period – its most distinctive sign – were waiting for her, their predestined mistress, to press her foot on the spring and set them all in motion. Gabriel brushed in a large bright picture of her progress through the time and round the world, round it and round it again, from continent to continent and clime to clime; with populations and deputations, reporters and photographers, placards and interviews and banquets, steamers, railways, dollars, diamonds, speeches and artistic ruin all jumbled into her train. Regardless of expense the spectacle would be and thrilling, though somewhat monotonous, the drama – a drama more bustling than any she would put on the stage and a spectacle that would beat everything for scenery. In the end her divine voice would crack, screaming to foreign ears and antipodal barbarians, and her clever manner would lose all quality, simplified to a few unmistakable knock-down dodges. Then she would be at the fine climax of life and glory, still young and insatiate, but already coarse, hard and raddled, with nothing left to do and nothing left to do it with, the remaining years all before her and the raison d’être all behind. It would be curious and magnificent and grotesque.
     “Oh, she’ll have some good years – they’ll be worth having,” Sherringham insisted, as they went on. “Besides, you see her too much as a humbug and too little as a real producer. She has ideas – great ones; she loves the thing for itself. That may keep a woman serious.”
     “Her greatest idea must always be to show herself; and fortunately she has a splendid self to show. I think of her absolutely as a real producer, but as a producer whose production is her own person. No ‘person’, even as fine a one as hers, will stand that for more than an hour, so that humbuggery has very soon to lend a hand. However,” Nash continued, “if she’s a fine humbug it will do as well, and perfectly suit the time. We can all be saved by vulgarity; that’s the solvent of all difficulties and the blessing of this delightful age. Let no man despair; a new hope has dawned.”
     “She’ll do her work like any other worker, with the advantage over many that her talent is rare,” Peter replied. “Compared with the life of many women, that’s security and sanity of the highest order. Then she can’t help her beauty. You can’t vulgarize that.”
     “Oh, can’t you?” exclaimed Gabriel Nash.
     “It will abide with her till the day of her death. It isn’t a mere superficial freshness. She’s very noble.”
     “Yes, that’s the pity of it,” said Nash. “She’s a capital girl, and I quite admit that she’ll do for a while a lot of good. She will have brightened up the world for a great many people; she will have brought the ideal nearer to them, held it fast for an hour, with its feet on earth and its great wings trembling. That’s always something, for blessed is he who has dropped even the smallest coin into the little iron box that contains the precious savings of mankind. Miriam will doubtless have dropped a big gold piece. It will be found, in the general scramble, on the day the race goes bankrupt. And then, for herself, she will have had a great go at life.”
     “Oh, yes, she’ll have got out of her hole; she won’t have vegetated,” said Sherringham. “That makes her touching to me; it adds to the many good reasons for which one may want to help her. She’s tackling a big job, and tackling it by herself; throwing herself upon the world, in good faith, and dealing with it as she can; meeting alone, in her youth, her beauty and her generosity all the embarrassments of notoriety and all the difficulties of a profession of which, if one half is what’s called brilliant, the other half is odious.”
     “She has great courage, but should you speak of her as solitary, with such a lot of us all round her?” Gabriel asked.
     “She’s a great thing for you and me, but we’re a small thing for her.”
     “Well, a good many small things may make up a considerable one,” Nash returned. “There must always be the man; he’s the indispensable element in such a life, and he’ll be the last thing she’ll ever want for.”
     “What man are you talking about?” Sherringham asked, rather confusedly.
     “The man of the hour, whoever he is. She’ll inspire innumerable devotions.”
     “Of course she will, and they will be precisely a part of the insufferable side of her life.”
     “Insufferable to whom?” Nash inquired. “Don’t forget that the insufferable side of her life will be just the side she’ll thrive on. You can’t eat your cake and have it, and you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. You can’t at once sit by the fire and fly about the world, and you can’t go round and round the globe without having adventures. You can’t be a great actress without quivering nerves. If you haven’t them you’ll only be a small one. If you have them, your friends will be pretty sure to hear of them. Your nerves and your adventures, your eggs and your cake, are part of the cost of the most expensive of professions. If you do your business at all you should do it handsomely, so that the costs may run up tremendously. You play with human passions, with exaltations and ecstasies and terrors, and if you trade on the fury of the elements you must know how to ride the storm.”
     “Those are the fine old commonplaces about the artistic temperament, but I usually find the artist a very meek, decent little person,” said Sherringham.
     “You never find the artist – you only find his work, and that’s all you need find. When the artist’s a woman and the woman’s an actress, meekness and decency will doubtless be there in the right proportions,” Nash went on. “Miriam will represent them for you, if you give her her starting-point, with the utmost charm.”
     “Of course she’ll have devotions – that’s all right,” said Sherringham, impatiently.
     “And – don’t you see? – they’ll mitigate her solitude, they’ll even enliven it,” Nash remarked.
     “She’ll probably box a good many ears: that’ll be lively,” Peter rejoined, with some grimness.
     “Oh, magnificent! it will be a merry life. Yet with its tragic passages, its distracted or its pathetic hours,” Nash continued. “In short a little of everything.”
     The two men walked on without further speech, till at last Sherringham said: “The best thing for a woman in her situation is to marry some good fellow.”
     “Oh, I dare say she’ll do that too!” Nash laughed; a remark in consequence of which Peter again lapsed into silence. Gabriel left him to enjoy his silence for some minutes; after which he added: “There’s a good fellow she’d marry to-morrow.”
     Peter hesitated. “Do you mean her friend Dashwood?”
     “No, no, I mean Nick Dormer.”
     “She’d marry him?” Sherringham asked.
     “I mean her head’s full of him. But she’ll hardly get the chance.”
     “Does she like him so much as that?” Sherringham went on.
     “I don’t know quite how much you mean, but enough for all practical ends.”
     “Marrying a fashionable actress – that’s hardly a practical end.”
     “Certainly not, but I’m not speaking from his point of view. Moreover I thought you just now said it would be such a good thing for her.”
     “To marry Nick Dormer?”
     “You said a good fellow, and he’s the very best.”
     “I wasn’t thinking of the man, but of the marriage. It would protect her, make things safe and comfortable for her and keep a lot of cads and blackguards away.”
     “She ought to marry the prompter or the box-keeper,” said Nash. “Then it would be all right. I think indeed they generally do, don’t they?”
     Sherringham felt for a moment a strong disposition to drop his companion on the spot – to cross to the other side of the street and walk away without him. But there was a different impulse which struggled with this one and, after a minute, overcame it – the impulse which led to his saying presently: “Has she told you that – that she’s in love with Nick?”
     “No, no – that’s not the way I know it.”
     “Has Nick told you, then?”
     “On the contrary, I’ve told him.”
     “You’ve rendered him a questionable service if you’ve no proof,” said Peter.
     “My proof is only that I’ve seen her with him. She’s charming, poor thing.”
     “But surely she isn’t in love with every man she’s charming to.”
     “I mean she’s charming to me,” Nash replied. “I see her that way. But judge for yourself – the first time you get a chance.”
     “When shall I get a chance? Nick doesn’t come near her.”
     “Oh, he’ll come, he’ll come; his picture isn’t finished.”
     “You mean he’ll be the box-keeper then?”
     “My dear fellow, I shall never allow it,” said Gabriel Nash. “It would be idiotic and quite unnecessary. He’s beautifully arranged, in quite a different line. Fancy his taking that sort of job on his hands! Besides, she would never expect it; she’s not such a goose. They’re very good friends – it will go on that way. She’s an excellent sort of woman for him to know; she’ll give him lots of ideas of the plastic kind. He would have been up there before this, but he has been absorbed in this delightful squabble with his constituents. That of course is pure amusement; but when once it’s well launched he’ll get back to business and his business will be a very different matter from Miriam’s. Imagine him writing her advertisements, living on her money, adding up her profits, having rows and recriminations with her agent, carrying her shawl, spending his days in her rouge-pot. The right man for that, if she must have one, will turn up. ‘Pour le mariage, non.’ Miriam isn’t an idiot; she really, for a woman, quite sees things as they are.”
     As Sherringham had not crossed the street and left Gabriel planted, he was obliged to brave the torment of this suggestive flow. But descrying in the dusky vista of the Edgware Road a vague and vigilant hansom, he waved his stick with eagerness and with the abrupt declaration that he was tired, must drive the rest of the way. He offered Nash, as he entered the vehicle, no seat, but this coldness was not reflected in the lucidity with which that master of every subject went on to affirm that there was, of course, a danger – the danger that in given circumstances Miriam would leave the stage.
     “Leave it you mean for some man?”
     “For the man we’re talking about.”
     “For Nick Dormer?” Peter asked from his place in the cab, his paleness lighted by its lamps.
     “If he should make it a condition. But why should he – why should he make any conditions. He’s not an ass either. You see it would be a bore,” Nash continued while the hansom waited, “because if she were to do anything of that sort she would make him pay for the sacrifice.”
     “Oh yes, she’d make him pay for the sacrifice,” Sherringham repeated.
     “And then, when he had paid, she’d go back to her footlights,” Gabriel added, explicatively, from the curbstone, as Sherringham closed the apron of the cab.
     “I see – she’d go back – good-night,” Peter replied. “Please go on!” he cried to the driver through the hole in the roof. And when the vehicle rolled away he subjoined to himself : “Of course she would – and quite right!”

     “Judge for yourself when you get a chance,” Nash had said; and as it turned out Sherringham was able to judge two days later, for he found his cousin in Balaklava Place on the Tuesday following his walk with Gabriel. He had not only stayed away from the theatre on the Monday evening (he regarded this as an achievement of some importance), but had not been near Miriam during the day. He had meant to absent himself from her company on Tuesday as well; a determination confirmed by the fact that the afternoon turned out wet. But when, at ten minutes to five o’clock, he jumped into a hansom and directed its course to St John’s Wood, it was precisely upon the weather that he shifted the responsibility of his behaviour.
     Miriam had dined when he reached the villa, but she was lying down – she was tired – before going to the theatre. Mrs Rooth was however in the drawing-room with three gentlemen, in two of whom the fourth visitor was not startled to recognize Basil Dashwood and Gabriel Nash. Dashwood appeared to have become Miriam’s brother-in-arms and a second child – a fonder one – to Mrs Rooth; it had come to Sherringham’s knowledge the last time he was in Balaklava Place that the young actor had finally moved his lodgings into the quarter, making himself a near neighbour for all sorts of convenience. “Hang his convenience!” Peter thought, perceiving that Mrs Lovick’s ‘Arty’ was now altogether one of the family. Oh, the family – it was a queer one to be connected with; that consciousness was acute in Sherringham’s breast to-day as he entered Mrs Rooth’s little circle. The room was filled with cigarette-smoke and there was a messy coffee-service on the piano, whose keys Basil Dashwood lightly touched for his own diversion. Nash, addressing the room, of course, was at one end of a little sofa, with his nose in the air, and Nick Dormer was at the other end, seated much at his ease, with a certain privileged appearance of having been there often before, though Sherringham knew he had not. He looked uncritical and very young, as rosy as a school-boy on a half-holiday. It was past five o’clock in the day, but Mrs Rooth was not dressed; there was however no want of finish in her elegant attitude – the same relaxed grandeur (she seemed to let you understand) for which she used to be distinguished at Castle Nugent when the house was full. She toyed incongruously, in her unbuttoned wrapper, with a large tinsel fan which resembled a theatrical property.
     It was one of the discomforts of Sherringham’s situation that many of those minor matters which are, superficially at least, most characteristic of the histrionic life had power to displease him, so that he was obliged to make the effort of indulgence. He disliked besmoked drawing-rooms and irregular meals and untidy arrangements; he could suffer from the vulgarity of Mrs Rooth’s apartments, the importunate photographs (they gave on his nerves), the barbarous absence of signs of an orderly domestic life, the odd volumes from the circulating library (you could see what they were – the very covers told you – at a glance) tumbled about with cups or glasses on them. He had not waited till now to make the reflection that it was a strange thing fate should have goaded him into that sort of contact; but as he stood before Mrs Rooth and her companions he made it perhaps more pointedly than ever. Her companions, somehow, who were not responsible, didn’t keep him from making it; which was particularly odd, as they were not, superficially, in the least of Bohemian type. Almost the first thing that struck him, as it happened, in coming into the room, was the essential good looks of his cousin, who was a gentleman to the eye in a different degree from the high-collared Dashwood. Peter didn’t hate him for being such a pleasant young Englishman; his consciousness was traversed rather by a fresh wave of annoyance at Julia’s failure to get on with him on that substantial basis.
     It was Sherringham’s first encounter with Nick since his arrival in London: they had been, on one side and the other, so much taken up with their own affairs. Since their last meeting Nick had, as we know, to his kinsman’s perception, really taken on a new character: he had done a fine stroke of business in a quiet way. This made him a figure to be counted with, and in just the sense in which Peter desired least to count with him. Poor Sherringham, after his summersault in the blue, was much troubled these last days; he was ravaged by contending passions; he paid, every hour, in a torment of unrest, for what was false in his position, the impossibility of being consistent, the opposition of interest and desire. Nick, his junior and a lighter weight, had settled his problem and showed no wounds: there was something impertinent and mystifying in it. He looked too innocently young and happy there, and too careless and modest and amateurish for a rival or for the genius that he was apparently going to try to be – the genius that, the other day in the studio with Biddy, Peter had got a startled glimpse of his capacity for being. Sherringham would have liked to feel that he had grounds of resentment, that Julia had been badly treated or that Nick was fatuous, for in that case he might have regarded him as offensive. But where was the offence of his merely being liked by a woman in respect to whom Peter had definitely denied himself the luxury of pretensions, especially if the offender had taken no action in the matter? It could scarcely be called culpable action to call, casually, on an afternoon when the lady was invisible. Peter, at any rate, was distinctly glad Miriam was invisible; and he proposed to himself to suggest to Nick after a little that they should adjourn together – they had such interesting things to talk about. Meanwhile Nick greeted him with candid tones and pleasant eyes, in which he could read neither confusion nor defiance. Sherringham was reassured against a danger he believed he didn’t recognize and puzzled by a mystery he flattered himself he didn’t mind. And he was still more ashamed of being reassured than of being puzzled.
     It must be recorded that Miriam remained invisible only a few minutes longer. Nick, as Sherringham gathered, had been about a quarter of an hour in the house, which would have given the girl, aroused from her repose, about time to array herself to come down to him. At all events she was in the room, prepared apparently to go to the theatre, very shortly after Sherringham had become sensible of how glad he was she was out of it. Familiarity had never yet cured him of a certain tremor of expectation and even of suspense in regard to her entrances; a flutter caused by the simple circumstance of her infinite variety. To say she was always acting suggests too much that she was often fatiguing; for her changing face affected this particular admirer at least not as a series of masks, but as a response to perceived differences, an intensity of sensibility, or still more as something cleverly constructive, like the shifting of the scene in a play or a room with many windows. Her incarnations were incalculable, but if her present denied her past and declined responsibility for her future, it made a good thing of the hour and kept the actual very actual. This time the actual was a bright, gentle, graceful, smiling young woman in a new dress, eager to go out, drawing on fresh gloves, who looked as if she were about to step into a carriage and (it was Gabriel Nash who thus formulated her physiognomy) do a lot of London things.
     The young woman had time to spare however, and she sat down and talked and laughed and presently gave, as it seemed to Sherringham, a finer character to the tawdry little room. It was honourable enough if it belonged to her. She described herself as in a state of nervous bewilderment – exhausted, stupefied, blinded with the rehearsals of the forthcoming piece (the first night was close at hand and it was going to be d’un mauvais – they would all see!), but there was no correspondence between this account of the matter and her present kindly gaiety. She sent her mother away – to “put on some clothes or something” – and, left alone with the visitors, went to a long glass between the windows, talking always to Nick Dormer, and revised and rearranged a little her own attire. She talked to Nick over her shoulder, and to Nick only, as if he were the guest to recognize and the others didn’t count. She broke out immediately about his having thrown up his seat, wished to know if the strange story told her by Mr Nash were true – that he had knocked all the hopes of his party into pie.
     Nick took it in this way and gave a jocular picture of his party’s ruin, the critical condition of public affairs: evidently as yet he remained inaccessible to shame or repentance. Sherringham, before Miriam’s entrance, had not, in shaking hands with Nick, made even a roundabout allusion to his odd ‘game’: there seemed a sort of muddled good taste in being silent about it. He winced a little on seeing how his scruples had been wasted, and was struck with the fine, jocose, direct turn of his kinsman’s conversation with the young actress. It was a part of her unexpectedness that she took the heavy literal view of Nick’s behaviour; declared frankly, though without ill-nature, that she had no patience with his folly. She was horribly disappointed – she had set her heart on his being a great statesman, one of the rulers of the people and the glories of England. What was so useful, what was so noble? – how it belittled everything else! She had expected him to wear a cordon and a star some day (and to get them very soon), and to come and see her in her loge: it would look so well. She talked like a lovely Philistine, except perhaps when she expressed surprise at hearing – she heard it from Gabriel Nash – that in England gentlemen accoutred with those emblems of their sovereign’s esteem didn’t so far forget themselves as to stray into the dressing-rooms of actresses. She admitted, after a moment, that they were quite right – the dressing-rooms of actresses were nasty places; but she was sorry, for that was the sort of thing she had always figured, in a corner – a distinguished man, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, admiring the smallness of a satin shoe and saying witty things. Gabriel Nash was convulsed with hilarity at this – such a vision of the British political hero. Coming back from the glass and making him give her his place on the sofa, she seated herself near Nick and continued to express her regret at his perversity.
     “They all say that – all the charming women, but I shouldn’t have looked for it from you,” Nick replied. “I’ve given you such an example of what I can do in another line.”
     “Do you mean my portrait? Oh, I’ve got it, with your name and ‘M.P.’ in the corner, and that’s precisely why I’m content. ‘M.P.’ in the corner of a picture is delightful, but I want to break the mould: I don’t in the least insist on your giving specimens to others. And the artistic life, when you can lead another – if you have any alternative, however, modest – is a very poor business. It comes last in dignity – after everything else. Ain’t I up to my eyes in it and don’t I know?”
     “You talk like my broken-hearted mother,” said Nick.
     “Does she hate it so intensely?”
     “She has the darkest ideas about it – the wildest theories. I can’t imagine where she gets them; partly, I think, from a general conviction that the ‘æsthetic’ – a horrible insidious foreign disease – is eating the healthy core out of English life (dear old English life!) and partly from the charming drawings in Punch and the clever satirical articles, pointing at mysterious depths of contamination, in the other weekly papers. She believes there’s a dreadful coterie of uncannily clever and desperately refined people, who wear a kind of loose, faded uniform and worship only beauty – which is a fearful thing – that Nash has introduced me to it, that I now spend all my time in it, and that for its sweet sake I have repudiated the most sacred engagements. Poor Nash, who, so far as I can make out, isn’t in any sort of society, however bad!”
     “But I’m uncannily clever,” Nash interposed, “and though I can’t afford the uniform (I believe you get it best somewhere in South Audley Street), I do worship beauty. I really think it’s me the weekly paper means.”
     “Oh, I’ve read the articles – I know the sort!” said Basil Dashwood.
     Miriam looked at him. “Go and see if the brougham’s there – I ordered it early.”
     Dashwood, without moving, consulted his watch. “It isn’t time yet – I know more about the brougham than you. I’ve made a rattling good arrangement for her – it really costs her nothing,” the young actor continued confidentially to Sherringham, near whom he had placed himself.
     “Your mother’s quite right to be broken-hearted,” Miriam declared, “and I can imagine exactly what she has been through. I should like to talk with her – I should like to see her.” Nick broke into ringing laughter, reminding her that she had talked to him, while she sat for her portrait in directly the opposite sense, most suggestively and inspiringly; and Nash explained that she was studying the part of a political duchess and wished to take observations for it, to work herself into the character. Miriam might in fact have been a political duchess as she sat with her head erect and her gloved hands folded, smiling with aristocratic dimness at Nick. She shook her head with stately sadness; she might have been representing Mary Stuart in Schiller’s play. “I’ve changed since that. I want you to be the grandest thing there is – the counsellor of kings.”
     Peter Sherringham wondered if possibly it were not since she had met his sister in Nick’s studio that she had changed, if perhaps it had not occurred to her that it would give Julia the sense of being more effectually routed to know that the woman who had thrown the bomb was one who also tried to keep Nick in the straight path. This indeed would involve an assumption that Julia might know, whereas it was perfectly possible that she mightn’t and more than possible that if she should she wouldn’t care. Miriam’s essential fondness for trying different ways was always there as an adequate reason for any particular way; a truth which however sometimes only half prevented the particular way from being vexatious to Sherringham.
     “Yet after all who is more æsthetic than you and who goes in more for the beautiful?” Nick asked. “You’re never so beautiful as when you pitch into it.”
     “Oh, I’m an inferior creature, of an inferior sex, and I have to earn my bread as I can. I’d give it all up in a moment, my odious trade – for an inducement.”
     “And pray what do you mean by an inducement?” Nick demanded.
     “My dear fellow, she means you – if you’ll give her a permanent engagement to sit for you!” exclaimed Gabriel Nash. “What crude questions you ask!”
     “I like the way she talks,” Basil Dashwood broke in, “when I gave up the most brilliant prospects, of very much the same kind as Mr Dormer’s, expressly to go on the stage.”
     “You’re an inferior creature too,” said Miriam.
     “Miss Rooth is very hard to satisfy,” Sherringham observed. “A man of distinction, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, in the corner of her loge – she has such a personage ready made to her hand and she doesn’t so much as look at him. Am I not an inducement? Have I not offered you a permanent engagement?”
     “Your orders – where are your orders?” Miriam inquired with a sweet smile, getting up.
     “I shall be a minister next year and an ambassador before you know it. Then I shall stick on everything that can be had.”
     “And they call us mountebanks!” cried the girl. “I’ve been so glad to see you again – do you want another sitting?” she went on, to Nick, as if to take leave of him.
     “As many as you’ll give me – I shall be grateful for all,” Nick answered. “I should like to do you as you are at present. You’re totally different from the woman I painted – you’re wonderful.”
     “The Comic Muse!” laughed Miriam. “Well, you must wait till our first nights are over – I’m sur les dents till then. There’s everything to do, and I have to do it all. That fellow’s good for nothing – for nothing but domestic life,” and she glanced at Basil Dashwood. “He hasn’t an idea – not one that you’d willingly tell of him, though he’s rather useful for the stables. We’ve got stables now – or we try to look as if we had: Dashwood’s ideas are de cette force. In ten days I shall have more time.”
     “The Comic Muse? Never, never,” Sherringham protested. “You’re not to go smirking through the age and down to posterity – I’d rather see you as Medusa crowned with serpents. That’s what you look like when you look best.”
     “That’s consoling – when I’ve just bought a new bonnet! I forgot to tell you just now that when you’re an ambassador you may propose anything you like,” Miriam went on. “But excuse me if I make that condition. Seriously speaking, come to me glittering with orders and I shall probably succumb. I can’t resist stars and garters. Only you must, as you say, have them all. I don’t like to hear Mr Dormer talk the slang of the studio – like that phrase just now: it is a fall to a lower state. However, when one is low one must crawl, and I’m crawling down to the Strand. Dashwood, see if mamma’s ready. If she isn’t I decline to wait; you must bring her in a hansom. I’ll take Mr Dormer in the brougham; I want to talk with Mr Dormer; he must drive with me to the theatre. His situation is full of interest.” Miriam led the way out of the room as she continued to chatter, and when she reached the house-door, with the four men in her train, the carriage had just drawn up at the garden-gate. It appeared that Mrs Rooth was not ready, and the girl, in spite of a remonstrance from Nick, who had the sense of usurping the old lady’s place, repeated her injunction that she should be brought on in a cab. Miriam’s companions accompanied her to the gate, and she insisted upon Nick’s taking his seat in the brougham and taking it first. Before she entered she put out her hand to Sherringham and, looking up at him, held his own kindly. “Dear old master, aren’t you coming to-night? I miss you when you’re not there.”
     “Don’t go – don’t go – it’s too much,” Nash interposed.
     “She is wonderful,” said Basil Dashwood, regarding her admiringly; “she has gone into the rehearsals, tooth and nail. But nothing takes it out of her.”
     “Nothing puts it into you, my dear!” Miriam returned. Then she went on, to Sherringham: “You’re the faithful one – you’re the one I count on.” He was not looking at her; his eyes travelled into the carriage, where they rested on Nick Dormer, established on the further seat with his face turned toward the further window. He was the one, faithful or no, counted on or no, whom a charming woman had preferred to carry off, and there was a certain triumph for him in that fact; but it pleased Sherringham to imagine that his attitude was a little foolish. Miriam discovered something of this sort in Sherringham’s eyes; for she exclaimed abruptly: “Don’t kill him – he doesn’t care for me!” With this she passed into the carriage, which rolled away.
     Sherringham stood watching it a moment, till he heard Basil Dashwood again beside him. “You wouldn’t believe what I made him do it for – a little fellow I know.”
     “Good-bye; take good care of Mrs Rooth,” said Gabriel Nash, waving a cheerful farewell to the young actor. He gave a smiling survey of the heavens and remarked to Sherringham that the rain had stopped. Was he walking, was he driving, should they be going in the same direction? Sherringham cared little about his direction and had little account of it to give; he simply moved away in silence, with Gabriel at his side. Gabriel was partly an affliction to him; indeed the fact that he had assumed a baleful fascination made him only a deeper affliction. Sherringham moreover did him the justice to observe that he could hold his peace occasionally: he had for instance this afternoon taken little part in the conversation in Balaklava Place. Peter greatly disliked to talk to him of Miriam, but he liked Nash to talk of her and he even liked him to say such things as he might contradict. He was not however moved to contradict an assertion dropped by his companion, disconnectedly, at the end of a few minutes, to the effect that she was after all the most good-natured creature alive. All the same, Nash added, it wouldn’t do for her to take possession of an organization like Nick’s; and he repeated that for his part he would never allow it. It would be on his conscience to interfere. To which Sherringham replied disingenuously that they might all do as they liked – it didn’t matter a button to him. And with an effort to carry off that comedy he changed the subject.

     Peter Sherringham would not for a moment have admitted that he was jealous of Nick Dormer, but he would almost have liked to be accused of it; for this would have given him an opportunity to declare with plausibility that so uncomfortable a passion had no application to his case. How could a man be jealous when he was not a suitor? how could he pretend to guard a property which was neither his own nor destined to become his own? There could be no question of loss when one had nothing at stake and no question of envy when the responsibility of possession was exactly what one prayed to be delivered from. The measure of one’s susceptibility was one’s pretensions, and Peter was not only ready to declare over and over again that, thank God, he had none: his spiritual detachment was still more complete – he literally suffered from the fact that the declaration was but little elicited. He connected an idea of virtue and honour with his attitude; for surely it was a high example of conduct to have quenched a personal passion for the sake of the public service. He had gone over the whole question at odd, irrepressible hours; he had returned, spiritually speaking, the buffet administered to him in a moment, that day in Rosedale Road, by the spectacle of the crânerie with which Nick could let worldly glories slide. Resolution for resolution he preferred after all another sort, and his own crânerie would be shown in the way he should stick to his profession and stand up for British interests. If Nick had leaped over a wall he would leap over a river. The course of his river was already traced and his loins were already girded. Thus he was justified in holding that the measure of a man’s susceptibility was a man’s attitude: that was the only thing he was bound to give an account of.
     He was perpetually giving an account of it to his own soul, in default of other listeners. He was quite angry at having tasted a sweetness in Miriam’s assurance, at the carriage door, bestowed indeed with very little solemnity, that Nick didn’t care for her. Wherein did it concern him that Nick cared for her or that Nick didn’t? Wherein did it signify to him that Gabriel Nash should have taken upon himself to disapprove of a union between the young actress and the young painter and to frustrate an accident that might perhaps be happy? For those had also been cooling words at the hour, though Peter blushed on the morrow to think that he had perceived in them anything but Nash’s personal sublimity. He was ashamed of having been refreshed, and refreshed by so sickly a draught, because it was his theory that he was not in a fever. As for keeping an eye on Nick, it would soon become clear to that young man and that young man’s charming friend that he had quite other uses for his sharpness. Nick and Miriam and Gabriel Nash could straighten out their complications according to their light. He would never speak to Nick of Miriam; he felt indeed just now as if he should never speak to Nick of anything. He had traced the course of his river, as I say, and the real proof would be the way he should fly through the air. It was a cause for action – for vigorous, unmistakable action. He had done very little since his arrival in London but moon round a fille de théâtre who was taken up partly, though she bluffed it off, with another man and partly with arranging new petticoats for a beastly old ‘poetic drama’; but this little waste of time should instantly be made up. He had given himself a certain rope and he had danced to the end of his rope, and now he would dance back. That was all right – so right that Sherringham could only express to himself how right it was by whistling gaily.
     He whistled as he went to dine with a great personage, the day after his meeting with Nick in Balaklava Place; a great personage to whom he had originally paid his respects – it was high time – the day before that meeting, the Monday previous. The sense of omissions to repair, of a superior line to take, perhaps made him study with more intensity to please the personage, who gave him ten minutes and asked him five questions. A great many doors were successively opened before any palpitating pilgrim who was about to enter the presence of this distinguished man; but they were discreetly closed again behind Sherringham, and I must ask the reader to pause with me at the nearer end of the momentary vista. This particular pilgrim fortunately felt that he could count upon being recognized not only as a faithful if obscure official in the great hierarchy, but as a clever young man who happened to be connected by blood with people his lordship had intimately known. No doubt it was simply as the clever young man that Peter received the next morning from the dispenser of his lordship’s hospitality a note asking him to dine on the morrow. He had received such cards before and he always responded to the invitation: he did so however on the present occasion with a sense of unusual intention. In due course his intention was translated into words: before the gentlemen left the dining-room he took the liberty of asking his noble host if during the next few days there would be three minutes more that he might, in his extreme benevolence, bestow upon him.
     “What is it you want? Tell me now,” the master of his fate replied, motioning to the rest of the company to pass out and detaining Peter in the dining-room.
     Peter’s excellent training covered every contingency: he could be concise or diffuse, as the occasion required. Even he himself however was surprised at the quick felicity of the terms in which he was conscious of conveying that if it were compatible with higher conveniences he should peculiarly like to be transferred to duties in a more distant quarter of the globe. Indeed though Sherringham was fond of thinking of himself as a man of emotions controlled by training, it is not impossible that there was a greater candour than he knew in the expression of his face and even the slight tremor of his voice as he presented this petition. He had wished extremely that his manner should be good in doing so, but perhaps the best part of it for his interlocutor was just the part in which it failed – in which it confessed a secret that the highest diplomacy would not have confessed. Sherringham remarked to the minister that he didn’t care in the least where the place might be, nor how little coveted a post; the further away the better and the climate didn’t matter. He would only prefer of course that there should be really something to do, although he would make the best of it even if there were not. He stopped in time, or at least he thought he did, not to appear to suggest that he covertly sought relief from the misery of a hindered passion in a flight to latitudes unfavourable to human life. His august patron gave him a sharp look which, for the moment, seemed the precursor of a sharper question; but the moment elapsed and the question did not come. This considerate omission, characteristic of a true man of the world and representing quick guesses and still quicker indifferences, made Sherringham from that moment his lordship’s ardent partisan. What did come was a good-natured laugh and the exclamation: “You know there are plenty of swamps and jungles, if you want that sort of thing.” Sherringham replied that it was very much that sort of thing he did want; whereupon his interlocutor continued: “I’ll see – I’ll see; if anything turns up, you shall hear.”
     Something turned up the very next day: our young man, taken at his word, found himself indebted to the post for a large, stiff, engraved official letter, in which the high position of minister to the smallest of Central American republics was offered to him. The republic, though small, was big enough to be ‘shaky’, and the position, though high, was not so exalted that there were not much greater altitudes above it to which it was a stepping-stone. Sherringham took one thing with another, rejoiced at his easy triumph, reflected that he must have been even more noticed at headquarters than he had hoped, and, on the spot, consulting nobody and waiting for nothing, signified his unqualified acceptance of the place. Nobody with a grain of sense would have advised him to do anything else. It made him happier than he had supposed he should ever be again; it made him feel professionally in the train, as they said in Paris; it was serious, it was interesting, it was exciting, and Sherringham’s imagination, letting itself loose into the future, began once more to scale the crowning heights. It was very simple to hold one’s course if one really tried, and he blessed shaky republics. A further communication informed him that he would be expected to return to Paris for a short interval a week later and that he would before that time be advised of the date at which he was to proceed to his remoter duties.

     The first thing Peter did now was to go and see Lady Agnes Dormer; it is not unworthy of note that he took on the other hand no step to make his promotion known to Miriam Rooth. To render it more probable he should find her he went at the luncheon-hour; and she was indeed on the point of sitting down to that repast with Grace. Biddy was not at home – Biddy was never at home now, her mother said: she was always at Nick’s place, she spent her life there, she ate and drank there, she almost slept there. What she found to do there in so many hours, or what was the irresistible spell, Lady Agnes could not pretend that she had succeeded in discovering. She spoke of this baleful resort only as “Nick’s place”, and she spoke of it at first as little as possible. She thought it very probable however that Biddy would come in early that afternoon: there was something or other, some common social duty, that she had condescended to promise she would perform with Grace. Poor Lady Agnes, whom Sherringham found in a very grim yet very tremulous condition (she assured her visitor her nerves were all gone), almost abused her younger daughter for two minutes, having evidently a deep-seated need of abusing some one. I must add however that she didn’t wait to meet Grace’s eye before recovering, by a rapid gyration, her view of the possibilities of things – those possibilities from which she still might squeeze, as a mother, the drop that would sweeten her cup. “Dear child,” she had the presence of mind to add, “her only fault is after all that she adores her brother. She has a capacity for adoration and must always take her gospel from some one.”
     Grace declared to Peter that her sister would have stayed at home if she had dreamed he was coming, and Lady Agnes let him know that she had heard all about the hour he had spent with the poor child at Nick’s place and about his extraordinary good-nature in taking the two girls to the play. Peter lunched in Calcutta Gardens, spending an hour there which proved at first unexpectedly and, as it seemed to him, unfairly dismal. He knew from his own general perceptions, from what Biddy had told him and from what he had heard Nick say in Balaklava Place, that Lady Agnes would have been wounded by her son’s apostasy; but it was not till he saw her that he appreciated the dark difference this young man’s behaviour had made in the outlook of his family. Evidently that behaviour had, as he phrased it, pulled the bottom out of innumerable private calculations. These were things that no outsider could measure and they were none of an outsider’s business; it was enough that Lady Agnes struck him really as a woman who had received her death-blow. She looked ten years older; she was white and haggard and tragic. Her eyes burned with a strange intermittent fire which made him say to himself that her children had better look out for her. When they were not filled with this unnatural flame they were suffused with comfortless tears; and altogether the afflicted lady was very bad – very bad indeed. It was because he had known she would be very bad that he had in his kindness called upon her in exactly this manner; but he recognized that to undertake to be kind to her in proportion to her need might carry one very far. He was glad he himself had not a wronged, mad mother, and he wondered how Nick Dormer could endure the home he had ruined. Apparently he didn’t endure it very much, but had taken definitive and highly convenient refuge in Rosedale Road.
     Peter’s judgement of his young kinsman was considerably confused, and a sensible element in it was the consciousness that he was perhaps just now not in the best state of mind for judging him at all. At the same time, though he held in general that an intelligent man has a legible warrant for doing the particular thing he prefers, he could scarcely help asking himself whether in the exercise of a virile freedom it had been absolutely indispensable that Nick should work such domestic woe. He admitted indeed that this was an anomalous vision of Nick, as the worker of domestic woe. Then he saw that Lady Agnes’s grievance (there came a moment, later, when she asserted as much) was not quite what Nick, in Balaklava Place, had represented it – with questionable taste perhaps – to a mocking actress; was not a mere shocked quarrel with his adoption of a ‘low’ career, or a horror, the old-fashioned horror, of the strange licences taken by artists under pretext of being conscientious: the day for this was past and English society thought the brush and the fiddle as good as anything else, with two or three exceptions. It was not what he had taken up but what he had put down that made the sorry difference, and the tragedy would have been equally great if he had become a wine-merchant or a horse-dealer. Peter had gathered at first that Lady Agnes would not trust herself to speak directly of her trouble, and he obeyed what he supposed to be the best discretion in making no allusion to it. But a few minutes before they rose from luncheon she broke out, and when he attempted to utter a word of mitigation there was something that went to his heart in the way she returned: “Oh, you don’t know – you don’t know!”
     He perceived Grace’s eyes fixed upon him at this instant with a look of supplication, and he was uncertain as to what she wanted – that he should say something more to console her mother or should hurry away from the subject. Grace looked old and plain and (he had thought, on coming in) rather cross, but she evidently wanted something. “You don’t know,” Lady Agnes repeated, with a trembling voice – “you don’t know.” She had pushed her chair a little away from the table; she held her pocket-handkerchief pressed hard to her mouth, almost stuffed into it, and her eyes were fixed on the floor. She made him feel as if he did know – knew what towering piles of confidence and hope had been dashed to the earth. Then Lady Agnes finished her sentence unexpectedly: “You don’t know what my life with my husband was.” Here, on the other hand, Peter was slightly at fault – he didn’t exactly see what her life with her husband had to do with it. What was clear to him however was that they literally had looked for the very greatest things from Nick. It was not quite easy to see why this had been the case – it had not been precisely Sherringham’s own prefigurement. Nick appeared to have had the faculty of communicating that sort of faith to women; he had originally given Julia a tremendous dose of it, though she had since shaken off the effects.
     “Do you really think he would have done such great things, politically speaking?” Peter inquired. “Do you consider that the root of the matter was in him?”
     Lady Agnes hesitated a moment, looked rather hard at her visitor. “I only think what all his friends – all his father’s friends – have thought. He was his father’s son, after all. No young man ever had a finer training, and he gave, from the first, repeated proof of having the highest sort of ability, the highest sort of ambition. See how he got in everywhere. Look at his first seat – look at his second,” Lady Agnes continued. “Look at what everyone says at this moment.”
     “Look at all the papers!” said Grace. “Did you ever hear him speak?” she asked. And when Peter reminded her that he had spent his life in foreign lands she went on: “Well, you lost something.”
     “It was very charming,” said Lady Agnes quietly.
     “Of course he’s charming, whatever he does,” Peter conceded. “He’ll be a charming artist.”
     “Oh, heaven!” groaned Lady Agnes, rising quickly.
     “He won’t – that’s the worst,” Grace amended. “It isn’t as if he’d do things people would like. I’ve been to his place and I never saw such a horrid lot of things – not at all clever or pretty.”
     “You know nothing whatever about the matter!” Lady Agnes exclaimed, with unexpected asperity. Then she added, to Peter, that, as it happened, her children did have a good deal of artistic taste: Grace was the only one who was totally deficient in it. Biddy was very clever – Biddy really might learn to do pretty things. And anything the poor child could learn was now no more than her duty – there was so little knowing what the future had in store for them all.
     “You think too much of the future – you take terribly gloomy views,” said Peter, looking for his hat.
     “What other views can one take, when one’s son has deliberately thrown away a fortune?”
     “Thrown one away? Do you mean through not marrying—?”
     “I mean through killing by his perversity the best friend he ever had.”
     Sherringham stared a moment; then with laughter: “Ah, but Julia isn’t dead of it?”
     “I’m not talking of Julia,” said Lady Agnes, with a good deal of majesty. “Nick isn’t mercenary, and I’m not complaining of that.”
     “She means Mr Carteret,” Grace explained. “He would have done anything if Nick had stayed in the House.”
     “But he’s not dead?”
     “Charles Carteret is dying,” said Lady Agnes – “his end is very, very near. He has been a sort of providence to us – he was Sir Nicholas’s second self. But he won’t stand such nonsense, and that chapter’s closed.”
     “You mean he has dropped Nick out of his will?”
     “Cut him off utterly. He has given him notice.”
     “The old scoundrel! But Nick will work the better for that – he’ll depend on himself.”
     “Yes, and whom shall we depend on?” Grace demanded.
     “Don’t be vulgar, for God’s sake!” her mother ejaculated with a certain inconsequence.
     “Oh, leave Nick alone – he’ll make a lot of money,” Peter declared cheerfully, following his two companions into the hall.
     “I don’t in the least care whether he does or not,” said Lady Agnes. “You must come up-stairs again – I’ve lots to say to you yet,” she went on, seeing that Peter had taken his hat. “You must arrange to come and dine with us immediately; it’s only because I’ve been so steeped in misery that I didn’t write to you the other day – directly after you called. We don’t give parties, as you may imagine, but if you’ll come just as we are, for old acquaintance’ sake—”
     “Just with Nick – if Nick will come – and dear Biddy,” Grace interposed.
     “Nick must certainly come, as well as dear Biddy, whom I hoped so much to find,” Peter rejoined. “Because I’m going away – I don’t know when I shall see them again.”
     “Wait with mamma. Biddy will come in at any moment,” Grace urged.
     “You’re going away?” asked Lady Agnes, pausing at the foot of the stairs and turning her white face upon him. Something in the tone of her voice showed that she had been struck by his own tone.
     “I have had promotion, and you must congratulate me. They are sending me out as minister to a little hot hole in Central America – five thousand miles away. I shall have to go rather soon.”
     “Oh, I’m so glad!” Lady Agnes breathed. Still she paused at the foot of the stair and still she gazed.
     “How very delightful, because it will lead, straight off, to all sorts of other good things!” Grace exclaimed.
     “Oh, I’m crawling up, and I’m an excellency,” Peter laughed.
     “Then if you dine with us your excellency must have great people to meet you.”
     “Nick and Biddy – they’re great enough.”
     “Come up-stairs – come up-stairs.” said Lady Agnes, turning quickly and beginning to ascend.
     “Wait for Biddy – I’m going out,” Grace continued, extending her hand to her kinsman. “I shall see you again – not that you care; but good-bye now. Wait for Biddy,” the girl repeated in a lower tone, fastening her eyes on his with the same urgent, mystifying gleam that he thought he had perceived in them at luncheon.
     “Oh, I’ll go and see her in Rosedale Road,” he answered.
     “Do you mean to-day – now?”
     “I don’t know about to-day, but before I leave England.”
     “Well, she’ll be in immediately,” said Grace. “Good-bye to your excellency.”
     “Come up, Peter – please come up,” called Lady Agnes, from the top of the stairs.
     He mounted, and when he found himself in the drawing-room with her, with the door closed, she told him that she was exceedingly interested in his fine prospects, that she wished to hear all about his new position. She rang for coffee and indicated the seat he would find most comfortable: he had for a moment an apprehension that she would tell him he might if he liked light a cigar. For Peter Sherringham had suddenly become restless – too restless to occupy a comfortable chair; he seated himself in it only to jump up again, and he went to the window – while he communicated to his hostess the very little that he knew about his prospective post – on hearing a vehicle drive up to the door. A strong light had just been thrown into his mind, and it seemed to grow stronger when, looking out of the window, he saw Grace Dormer issue from the house in a bonnet and jacket which had all the air of having been assumed with extraordinary speed. Her jacket was unbuttoned, her gloves were dangling from her hand and she was tying her bonnet-strings. The vehicle into which she hastily sprang was a hansom-cab which had been summoned by the butler from the doorstep and which rolled away with her after she had given the cabman an address.
     “Where is Grace going in such a hurry?” he asked of Lady Agnes; to which she replied that she had not the least idea – her children, at the pass they had all come to, knocked about as they liked.
     Peter sat down again; he stayed a quarter of an hour and then he stayed longer, and during this time his appreciation of what Lady Agnes had in her mind gathered force. She showed him clearly enough what she had in her mind, although she showed it by no clumsy nor reprehensible overtures. It looked out of her sombre, conscious eyes and quavered in her preoccupied, perfunctory tones. She manifested an extravagant interest in his future proceedings, the probable succession of events in his career, the different honours he would be likely to come in for, the salary attached to his actual appointment, the salary attached to the appointments that would follow – they would be sure to, wouldn’t they? – and what he might reasonably expect to save. Oh, he must save – Lady Agnes was an advocate of saving; and he must take tremendous pains and get on and be clever and ambitious: he must make himself indispensable and rise to the top. She was urgent and suggestive and sympathetic; she threw herself into the vision of his achievements and emoluments as if to satisfy a little the sore hunger with which Nick’s treachery had left her. This was touching to Peter Sherringham, and he did not remain unmoved even at those more importunate moments when, as she fell into silence, fidgeting feverishly with a morsel of fancy-work that she had plucked from a table, her whole presence became an intense repressed appeal to him. What that appeal would have been had it been uttered was: “Oh, Peter, take little Biddy; oh, my dear young friend, understand your interests at the same time that you understand mine; be kind and reasonable and clever; save me all further anxiety and tribulation and accept my lovely, faultless child from my hands.”
     That was what Lady Agnes had always meant, more or less, that was what Grace had meant, and they meant it with singular lucidity on the present occasion. Lady Agnes meant it so much that from one moment to another Peter scarcely knew what she might do; and Grace meant it so much that she had rushed away in a hansom to fetch her sister from the studio. Grace, however, was a fool, for Biddy certainly wouldn’t come. The news of his promotion had set them off, adding brightness to their idea of his being an excellent match; bringing home to them sharply the sense that if he were going away to strange countries he must take Biddy with him – that something at all events must be settled about Biddy before he went. They had suddenly begun to throb with the conviction that they had no time to lose.
     Strangely enough, the perception of all this had not the effect of throwing Peter on the defensive, or at least of making him wish to bolt. When once he had discovered what was in the air he recognized a propriety, a real felicity in it; could not deny that he was in certain ways a good match, since it was quite probable he would go far; and was even generous enough (as he had no fear of being dragged to the altar) to enter into the conception that he might offer some balm to a mother who had had a horrid disappointment. The feasibility of marrying Biddy was not exactly augmented by the idea that his doing so would be a great offset to what Nick had made Lady Agnes suffer; but at any rate Peter did not dislike his strenuous companion so much as to wish to punish her for being strenuous. He was not afraid of her, whatever she might do; and though he was unable to grasp the practical relevancy of Biddy’s being produced on the instant he was willing to linger for half an hour on the chance of her turning up.
     There was a certain contagion in Lady Agnes’s appeal – it made him appeal sensibly to himself. For indeed, as it is time to say, the glass of our young man’s spirit had been polished for that reflection. It was only at this moment that he became really candid with himself. When he made up his mind that his only safety was in flight and took the strong measure of asking for assistance to flee, he was very conscious that another and probably still more effectual safeguard (especially if the two should be conjoined) lay in the hollow of his hand. Julia Dallow’s words in Paris had come back to him and had seemed much wiser than when they were spoken: “She’ll save you disappointments; you would know the worst that can happen to you, and it wouldn’t be bad.” Julia had put it into a nutshell – Biddy would probably save him disappointments. And then she was – well, she was Biddy. Peter knew better what that was since the hour he had spent with her in Rosedale Road. But he had brushed away the sense of it, though he was aware that in doing so he took only half measures, was even guilty of a sort of fraud upon himself. If he was sincere in wishing to put a gulf between his future and that portion of his past and present which was associated with Miriam Rooth, there was a very simple way to do so. He had dodged that way, dishonestly fixing upon another which, taken alone, was far from being so good; but Lady Agnes brought him back to it. She held him in magnanimous contemplation of it, during which the safety, as Julia had called it, of the remedy became fascinating to his mind, especially as that safety appeared not to exclude a concomitant sweetness. It would be simple and it would swallow up his problems; it would put an end to all alternatives, which, as alternatives were otherwise putting an end to him, would be an excellent thing. It would settle the whole question of his future, and it was high time t