d or imagined
in the people about her. Interested as he had ever been in the
profession of which she was potentially an ornament, this idea startled
him by its novelty and even lent, on the spot, a formidable, a really
appalling character to Miriam Rooth. It struck him abruptly that a woman
whose only being was to "make believe," to make believe she had any and
every being you might like and that would serve a purpose and produce a
certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her
personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to
himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration--such a
woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing
to "be fond" of, because there would be nothing to take hold of. He felt
for a moment how simple he had been not to have achieved before this
analysis of the actress. The girl's very face made it vivid to him
now--the discovery that she positively had no countenance of her own,
but only the countenance of the occasion, a sequence, a variety--capable
possibly of becoming immense--of representative movements. She was
always trying them, practising them, for her amusement or profit,
jumping from one to the other and extending her range; and this would
doubtless be her occupation more and more as she acquired ease and
confidence. The expression that came nearest belonging to her, as it
were, was the one that came nearest being a blank--an air of inanity
when she forgot herself in some act of sincere attention. Then her eye
was heavy and her mouth betrayed a commonness; though it was perhaps
just at such a moment that the fine line of her head told most. She had
looked slightly _bete_ even when Sherringham, on their first meeting at
Madame Carre's, said to Nick Dormer that she was the image of the Tragic
Muse.

Now, at any rate, he seemed to see that she might do what she liked with
her face. It was an elastic substance, an element of gutta-percha, like
the flexibility of the gymnast, the lady at the music-hall who is shot
from the mouth of a cannon. He winced a little at this coarser view of
the actress; he had somehow always looked more poetically at that
priestess of art. Yet what was she, the priestess, when one came to
think of it, but a female gymnast, a mountebank at higher wages? She
didn't literally hang by her heels from a trapeze and hold a fat man in
her teeth, but she made the same use of her tongue, of her eye