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