he greater part of the rest of my days--do you see
that?--to play the stuff I'm acting now. I'm studying Juliet and I want
awfully to do her, but really I'm mortally afraid lest, making a success
of her, I should find myself in such a box. Perhaps the brutes would
want Juliet for ever instead of my present part. You see amid what
delightful alternatives one moves. What I long for most I never shall
have had--five quiet years of hard all-round work in a perfect company,
with a manager more perfect still, playing five hundred things and never
being heard of at all. I may be too particular, but that's what I should
have liked. I think I'm disgusting with my successful crudities. It's
discouraging; it makes one not care much what happens. What's the use,
in such an age, of being good?"

"Good? Your haughty claim," Nick laughed, "is that you're bad."

"I mean _good_, you know--there are other ways. Don't be stupid." And
Miriam tapped him--he was near her at the door--with her parasol.

"I scarcely know what to say to you," he logically pleaded, "for
certainly it's your fault if you get on so fast."

"I'm too clever--I'm a humbug."

"That's the way I used to be," said Nick.

She rested her brave eyes on him, then turned them over the room slowly;
after which she attached them again, kindly, musingly--rather as if he
had been a fine view or an interesting object--to his face. "Ah, the
pride of that--the sense of purification! He 'used' to be forsooth! Poor
me! Of course you'll say, 'Look at the sort of thing I've undertaken to
produce compared with the rot you have.' So it's all right. Become great
in the proper way and don't expose me." She glanced back once more at
the studio as if to leave it for ever, and gave another last look at the
unfinished canvas on the easel. She shook her head sadly, "Poor Mr.
Sherringham--with _that_!" she wailed.

"Oh I'll finish it--it will be very decent," Nick said.

"Finish it by yourself?"

"Not necessarily. You'll come back and sit when you return to London."

"Never, never, never again."

He wondered. "Why you've made me the most profuse offers and promises."

"Yes, but they were made in ignorance and I've backed out of them. I'm
capricious too--_faites la part de ca_. I see it wouldn't do--I didn't
know it then. We're too far apart--I _am_, as you say, a Philistine."
And as he protested with vehemence against this unscrupulous bad faith
she added: "You'll find other models. P