_parlez-moi de ca_ and of the way I understand it! If I were to go in
for being respectable you'd see something fine. I'm awfully conservative
and I know what respectability is, even when I meet people of society on
the accidental middle ground of either glowering or smirking. I know
also what it isn't--it isn't the sweet union of well-bred little girls
('carefully-nurtured,' don't they call them?) and painted she-mummers. I
should carry it much further than any of these people: I should never
look at the likes of us! Every hour I live I see that the wisdom of the
ages was in the experience of dear old Madame Carre--was in a hundred
things she told me. She's founded on a rock. After that," Miriam went on
to her host, "I can assure you that if you were so good as to bring Miss
Dormer to see us we should be angelically careful of her and surround
her with every attention and precaution."

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

Nick was appealed to, but he hung back, drawing with a free hand, and
while he forbore Miriam took it up. "Mother's good--mother's very good;
but it's only little by little that you discover how good she is." This
seemed to leave him at ease to ask their companion, with the
preliminary intimation that what she had just said was very striking,
what she meant by her daughter's condu