talent capable
of such an exhibition was capable of anything.

"But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great:
Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose."

As the girl turned to her imagined child with this exquisite
apostrophe--she addressed Mr. Dashwood as if he were playing Arthur, and
he lowered his book, dropped his head and his eyes and looked handsome
and ingenuous--she opened at a stroke to Sherringham's vision a prospect
that they would yet see her express tenderness better even than anything
else. Her voice was enchanting in these lines, and the beauty of her
performance was that though she uttered the full fury of the part she
missed none of its poetry.

"Where did she get hold of that--where did she get hold of that?" Peter
wondered while his whole sense vibrated. "She hadn't got hold of it when
I went away." And the assurance flowed over him again that she had found
the key to her box of treasures. In the summer, during their weeks of
frequent meeting, she had only fumbled with the lock. One October day,
while he was away, the key had slipped in, had fitted, or her finger at
last had touched the right spring and the capricious casket had flown
open.

It was during the present solemnity that, excited by the way she came
out and with a hundred stirred ideas about her wheeling through his
mind, he was for the first time and most vividly visited by a perception
that ended by becoming frequent with him--that of the perfect presence
of mind, unconfused, unhurried by emotion, that any artistic performance
requires and that all, whatever the instrument, require in exactly the
same degree: the application, in other words, clear and calculated,
crystal-firm as it were, of the idea conceived in the glow of
experience, of suffering, of joy. He was afterwards often to talk of
this with Miriam, who, however, was never to be able to present him with
a neat theory of the subject. She had no knowledge that it was publicly
discussed; she only ranged herself in practice on the side of those who
hold that at the moment of production the artist can't too much have his
wits about him. When Peter named to her the opinion of those maintaining
that at such a crisis the office of attention ceases to be filled she
stared with surprise and then broke out: "Ah the poor idiots!" She
eventually became, in her judgements, in impatience an