that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but
evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and
whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied;
moreover, he looked further ahead than any one.

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

The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man
mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped
they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper