he new thing, the piece in rehearsal; he knew
all about everything--receipts and salaries and expenses and newspaper
articles, and what old Baskerville said and what Mrs. Ruffler thought:
matters of superficial concern to his fellow-guest, who wondered, before
they had sight of Miriam, if she talked with her "walking-gentleman"
about them by the hour, deep in them and finding them not vulgar and
boring but the natural air of her life and the essence of her
profession. Of course she did--she naturally would; it was all in the
day's work and he might feel sure she wouldn't turn up her nose at the
shop. He had to remind himself that he didn't care if she didn't, that
he would really think worse of her if she should. She certainly was in
deep with her bland playmate, talking shop by the hour: he could see
this from the fellow's ease of attitude, the air of a man at home and
doing the honours. He divined a great intimacy between the two young
artists, but asked himself at the same time what he, Peter Sherringham,
had to say about it. He didn't pretend to control Miriam's intimacies,
it was to be supposed; and if he had encouraged her to adopt a
profession rich in opportunities for comradeship it was not for him to
cry out because she had taken to it kindly. He had already descried a
fund of utility in Mrs. Lovick's light brother; but it irritated him,
all the same, after a while, to hear the youth represent himself as
almost indispensable. He was practical--there was no doubt of that; and
this idea added to Peter's paradoxical sense that as regards the matters
actually in question he himself had not this virtue. Dashwood had got
Mrs. Rooth the house; it happened by a lucky chance that Laura Lumley,
to whom it belonged--Sherringham would know Laura Lumley?--wanted to get
rid, for a mere song, of the remainder of the lease. She was going to
Australia with a troupe of her own. They just stepped into it; it was
good air--the best sort of London air to live in, to sleep in, for
people of their trade. Peter came back to his wonder at what Miriam's
personal relations with this deucedly knowing gentleman might be, and
was again able to assure himself that they might be anything in the
world she liked, for any stake he, the familiar of the Foreign Office,
had in them. Dashwood told him of all the smart people who had tried to
take up the new star--the way the London world had already held out its
hand; and perhaps it was Sherringham's