ut if it was not, as such people said, a serious field, was not the
compensation just that you couldn't be seriously entangled in it?
Sherringham's great advantage, as he regarded the matter, was that he
had always kept his taste for the drama quite in its place. His
facetious cousin was free to pretend that it sprawled through his life;
but this was nonsense, as any unprejudiced observer of that life would
unhesitatingly attest. There had not been the least sprawling, and his
interest in the art of Garrick had never, he was sure, made him in any
degree ridiculous. It had never drawn down from above anything
approaching a reprimand, a remonstrance, a remark. Sherringham was
positively proud of his discretion, for he was not a little proud of
what he did know about the stage. Trifling for trifling, there were
plenty of his fellows who had in their lives infatuations less edifying
and less confessable. Hadn't he known men who collected old
invitation-cards and were ready to commit _bassesses_ for those of the
eighteenth century? hadn't he known others who had a secret passion for
shuffleboard? His little weaknesses were intellectual--they were a part
of the life of the mind. All the same, on the day they showed a symptom
of interfering they should be plucked off with a turn of the wrist.

Sherringham scented interference now, and interference in rather an
invidious form. It might be a bore, from the point of view of the
profession, to find one's self, as a critic of the stage, in love with a
_coquine_; but it was a much greater bore to find one's self in love
with a young woman whose character remained to be estimated. Miriam
Rooth was neither fish nor flesh: one had with her neither the
guarantees of one's own class nor the immunities of hers. What _was_
hers if one came to that? A rare ambiguity on this point was part of the
fascination she had ended by throwing over him. Poor Peter's scheme for
getting on had contained no proviso against his falling in love, but it
had embodied an important clause on the subject of surprises. It was
always a surprise to fall in love, especially if one was looking out for
it; so this contingency had not been worth official paper. But it
became a man who respected the service he had undertaken for the State
to be on his guard against predicaments from which the only issue was
the rigour of matrimony. Ambition, in the career, was probably
consistent with marrying--but only with opening one