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

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

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

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

Mi