's eyes very wide to
do it. That was the fatal surprise--to be led to the altar in a dream.
Sherringham's view of the proprieties attached to such a step was high
and strict; and if he held that a man in his position was, above all as
the position improved, essentially a representative of the greatness of
his country, he considered that the wife of such a personage would
exercise in her degree--for instance at a foreign court--a function no
less symbolic. She would in short always be a very important quantity,
and the scene was strewn with illustrations of this general truth. She
might be such a help and might be such a blight that common prudence
required some test of her in advance. Sherringham had seen women in the
career, who were stupid or vulgar, make such a mess of things as would
wring your heart. Then he had his positive idea of the perfect
ambassadress, the full-blown lily of the future; and with this idea
Miriam Rooth presented no analogy whatever.

The girl had described herself with characteristic directness as "all
right"; and so she might be, so she assuredly was: only all right for
what? He had made out she was not sentimental--that whatever capacity
she might have for responding to a devotion or for desiring it was at
any rate not in the direction of vague philandering. With him certainly
she had no disposition to philander. Sherringham almost feared to dwell
on this, lest it should beget in him a rage convertible mainly into
caring for her more. Rage or no rage it would be charming to be in love
with her if there were no complications; but the complications were
just what was clearest in the prospect. He was perhaps cold-blooded to
think of them, but it must be remembered that they were the particular
thing his training had equipped him for dealing with. He was at all
events not too cold-blooded to have, for the two months of his holiday,
very little inner vision of anything more abstract than Miriam's face.
The desire to see it again was as pressing as thirst, but he tried to
practise the endurance of the traveller in the desert. He kept the
Channel between them, but his spirit consumed every day an inch of the
interval, until--and it was not long--there were no more inches left.
The last thing he expected the future ambassadress to have been was
_fille de theatre_. The answer to this objection was of course that
Miriam was not yet so much of one but that he could easily, by a
handsome "worldly" offer