iam didn't introduce her young friend to him. She was,
however, both then and later perfectly neglectful of such cares, never
thinking, never minding how other people got on together. When she found
they didn't get on she jeered at them: that was the nearest she came to
arranging for them. Our young man noted in her from the moment she felt
her strength an immense increase of this good-humoured inattention to
detail--all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to
sacrifice holocausts of feelings when the feelings were other people's.
This conferred on her a large profanity, an absence of ceremony as to
her social relations, which was both amusing because it suggested that
she would take what she gave, and formidable because it was inconvenient
and you mightn't care to give what she would take.

"If you haven't any art it's not quite the same as if you didn't hide
it, is it?" Basil Dashwood ingeniously threw out.

"That's right--say one of your clever things!" Miriam sweetly responded.

"You're always acting," he declared in English and with a simple-minded
laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what
he himself had felt weeks before.

"And when you've shown them your fish-wife, to your public _de la-bas_,
what will you do next?" asked Madame Carre.

"I'll do Juliet--I'll do Cleopatra."

"Rather a big bill, isn't it?" Mr. Dashwood volunteered to Sherringham
in a friendly but discriminating manner.

"Constance and Juliet--take care you don't mix them," said Sherringham.

"I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters,"
Miriam returned.

"Ah, _vous en etes la_?" cried the old actress. "You may have a hundred
characters, but you've only three plays. I'm told that's all there are
in English."

Miriam, admirably indifferent to this charge, appealed to Peter. "What
arrangements have you made? What do the people want?"

"The people at the theatre?"

"I'm afraid they don't want _King John_, and I don't believe they hunger
for _Antony and Cleopatra_," Basil Dashwood suggested. "Ships and sieges
and armies and pyramids, you know: we mustn't be too heavy."

"Oh I hate scenery!" the girl sighed.

"_Elle est superbe_," said Madame Carre. "You must put those pieces on
the stage: how will you do it?"

"Oh we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carre"--Mr. Dashwood
was all geniality. "They put money on it, you know."

"On it? But what do they put _in_