"Create it and reveal it,
rather; give us something new and large and of the first order!" He had
_seen_ Miriam now; he had never seen her before; he had never seen her
till he saw her in her conditions. Oh her conditions--there were many
things to be said about them; they were paltry enough as yet, inferior,
inadequate, obstructive, as compared with the right, full, finished
setting of such a talent; but the essence of them was now, irremovably,
in our young man's eyes, the vision of how the uplifted stage and the
listening house transformed her. That idea of her having no character of
her own came back to him with a force that made him laugh in the empty
street: this was a disadvantage she reduced so to nothing that obviously
he hadn't known her till to-night. Her character was simply to hold you
by the particular spell; any other--the good nature of home, the
relation to her mother, her friends, her lovers, her debts, the practice
of virtues or industries or vices--was not worth speaking of. These
things were the fictions and shadows; the representation was the deep
substance.

Peter had as he went an intense vision--he had often had it before--of
the conditions still absent, the great and complete ones, those which
would give the girl's talent a superior, a discussable stage. More than
ever he desired them, mentally invoked them, filled them out in
imagination, cheated himself with the idea that they were possible. He
saw them in a momentary illusion and confusion: a great academic,
artistic theatre, subsidised and unburdened with money-getting, rich in
its repertory, rich in the high quality and the wide array of its
servants, rich above all in the authority of an impossible
administrator--a manager personally disinterested, not an actor with an
eye to the main chance; pouring forth a continuity of tradition,
striving for perfection, laying a splendid literature under
contribution. He saw the heroine of a hundred "situations," variously
dramatic and vividly real; he saw comedy and drama and passion and
character and English life; he saw all humanity and history and poetry,
and then perpetually, in the midst of them, shining out in the high
relief of some great moment, an image as fresh as an unveiled statue. He
was not unconscious that he was taking all sorts of impossibilities and
miracles for granted; but he was under the conviction, for the time,
that the woman he had been watching three hours, the incarnation o