nfidence as well as many familiar pauses as she sat there;
and she was ready to tell Nick the whole history of her _debut_--the
chance that had suddenly turned up and that she had caught, with a
fierce leap, as it passed. He missed some of the details in his
attention to his own task, and some of them he failed to understand,
attached as they were to the name of Mr. Basil Dashwood, which he heard
for the first time. It was through Mr. Dashwood's extraordinary
exertions that a hearing--a morning performance at a London theatre--had
been obtained for her. That had been the great step, for it had led to
the putting on at night of the play, at the same theatre, in place of a
wretched thing they were trying (it was no use) to keep on its feet, and
to her engagement for the principal part. She had made a hit in it--she
couldn't pretend not to know that; but she was already tired of it,
there were so many other things she wanted to do; and when she thought
it would probably run a month or two more she fell to cursing the odious
conditions of artistic production in such an age. The play was a more or
less idiotised version of a new French piece, a thing that had taken in
Paris at a third-rate theatre and was now proving itself in London good
enough for houses mainly made up of ten-shilling stalls. It was Dashwood
who had said it would go if they could get the rights and a fellow to
make some changes: he had discovered it at a nasty little place she had
never been to, over the Seine. They had got the rights, and the fellow
who had made the changes was practically Dashwood himself; there was
another man in London, Mr. Gushmore--Miriam didn't know if Nick had
heard of him (Nick hadn't) who had done some of it. It had been awfully
chopped down, to a mere bone, with the meat all gone; but that was what
people in London seemed to like. They were very innocent--thousands of
little dogs amusing themselves with a bone. At any rate she had made
something, she had made a figure, of the woman--a dreadful stick, with
what Dashwood had muddled her into; and Miriam added in the complacency
of her young expansion: "Oh give me fifty words any time and the ghost
of a situation, and I'll set you up somebody. Besides, I mustn't abuse
poor Yolande--she has saved us," she said.

"'Yolande'--?"

"Our ridiculous play. That's the name of the impossible woman. She has
put bread into our mouths and she's a loaf on the shelf for the future.
The rights ar