's the first requisite."

"But where? That's what I ask!" said Mrs. Rooth.

"Why not here?" Sherringham threw out.

"Oh here!" And the good lady shook her head with a world of sad
significance.

"Come and live in London and then I shall be able to paint your
daughter," Nick Dormer interposed.

"Is that all it will take, my dear fellow?" asked Gabriel Nash.

"Ah, London's full of memories," Mrs. Rooth went on. "My father had a
great house there--we always came up. But all that's over."

"Study here and then go to London to appear," said Peter, feeling
frivolous even as he spoke.

"To appear in French?"

"No, in the language of Shakespeare."

"But we can't study that here."

"Mr. Sherringham means that he will give you lessons," Madame Carre
explained. "Let me not fail to say it--he's an excellent critic."

"How do you know that--you who're beyond criticism and perfect?" asked
Sherringham: an inquiry to which the answer was forestalled by the
girl's rousing herself to make it public that she could recite the
"Nights" of Alfred de Musset.

"Diable!" said the actress: "that's more than I can! By all means give
us a specimen."

The girl again placed herself in position and rolled out a fragment of
one of the splendid conversations of Musset's poet with his muse--rolled
it loudly and proudly, tossed it and tumbled it about the room. Madame
Carre watched her at first, but after a few moments she shut her eyes,
though the best part of the business was to take in her young
candidate's beauty. Sherringham had supposed Miriam rather abashed by
the flatness of her first performance, but he now saw how little she
could have been aware of this: she was rather uplifted and emboldened.
She made a mush of the divine verses, which in spite of certain
sonorities and cadences, an evident effort to imitate a celebrated
actress, a comrade of Madame Carre, whom she had heard declaim them, she
produced as if she had been dashing blindfold at some playfellow she was
to "catch." When she had finished Madame Carre passed no judgement, only
dropping: "Perhaps you had better say something English." She suggested
some little piece of verse--some fable if there were fables in English.
She appeared but scantily surprised to hear that there were not--it was
a language of which one expected so little. Mrs. Rooth said: "She knows
her Tennyson by heart. I think he's much deeper than La Fontaine"; and
after some deliberation and delay Mir