end my life with you the
better."

"If you'll do that I'll be your wife the day after your first
appearance. That would be really respectable," Miriam said.

"Unfortunately I've no talent."

"That would only make it the more respectable."

"You're just like poor Nick," Peter returned--"you've taken to imitating
Gabriel Nash. Don't you see that it's only if it were a question of my
going on the stage myself that there would be a certain fitness in your
contrasting me invidiously with Nick and in my giving up one career for
another? But simply to stand in the wing and hold your shawl and your
smelling-bottle--!" he concluded mournfully, as if he had ceased to
debate.

"Holding my shawl and my smelling-bottle is a mere detail, representing
a very small part of the whole precious service, the protection and
encouragement, for which a woman in my position might be indebted to a
man interested in her work and as accomplished and determined as you
very justly describe yourself."

"And would it be your idea that such a man should live on the money
earned by an exhibition of the person of his still more accomplished and
still more determined wife?"

"Why not if they work together--if there's something of his spirit and
his support in everything she does?" Miriam demanded. "_Je vous
attendais_ with the famous 'person'; of course that's the great stick
they beat us with. Yes, we show it for money, those of us who have
anything decent to show, and some no doubt who haven't, which is the
real scandal. What will you have? It's only the envelope of the idea,
it's only our machinery, which ought to be conceded to us; and in
proportion as the idea takes hold of us do we become unconscious of the
clumsy body. Poor old 'person'--if you knew what _we_ think of it! If
you don't forget it that's your own affair: it shows you're dense before
the idea."

"That _I_'m dense?"--and Peter appealed to their lamplit solitude, the
favouring, intimate night that only witnessed his defeat, as if this
outrage had been all that was wanting.

"I mean the public is--the public who pays us. After all, they expect us
to look at _them_ too, who are not half so well worth it. If you should
see some of the creatures who have the face to plant themselves there in
the stalls before one for three mortal hours! I daresay it would be
simpler to have no bodies, but we're all in the same box, and it would
be a great injustice to the idea, and we're all sho