lass as we see them about us. There
_was_ a nice point if one would--yet only nice enough, after all, to be
easily amusing. We shall deal with it later on, however, in a more
urgent connexion. What would have worried me much more had it dawned
earlier is the light lately thrown by that admirable writer M. Anatole
France on the question of any animated view of the histrionic
temperament--a light that may well dazzle to distress any ingenuous
worker in the same field. In those parts of his brief but inimitable
_Histoire Comique_ on which he is most to be congratulated--for there
are some that prompt to reserves--he has "done the actress," as well as
the actor, done above all the mountebank, the mummer and the _cabotin_,
and mixed them up with the queer theatric air, in a manner that
practically warns all other hands off the material for ever. At the same
time I think I saw Miriam, and without a sacrifice of truth, that is of
the particular glow of verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by,
in a complexity of relations finer than any that appear possible for the
gentry of M. Anatole France.

Her relation to Nick Dormer, for instance, was intended as a superior
interest--that of being (while perfectly sincere, sincere for _her_, and
therefore perfectly consonant with her impulse perpetually to perform
and with her success in performing) the result of a touched imagination,
a touched pride for "art," as well as of the charm cast on other
sensibilities still. Dormer's relation to herself is a different matter,
of which more presently; but the sympathy she, poor young woman, very
generously and intelligently offers him where most people have so
stinted it, is disclosed largely at the cost of her egotism and her
personal pretensions, even though in fact determined by her sense of
their together, Nick and she, postponing the "world" to their conception
of other and finer decencies. Nick can't on the whole see--for I have
represented him as in his day quite sufficiently troubled and
anxious--why he should condemn to ugly feebleness his most prized
faculty (most prized, at least, by himself) even in order to keep his
seat in Parliament, to inherit Mr. Carteret's blessing and money, to
gratify his mother and carry out the mission of his father, to marry
Julia Dallow in fine, a beautiful imperative woman with a great many
thousands a year. It all comes back in the last analysis to the
individual vision of decency, the critical