sat down again, that the noise made by Miss Rooth was not exactly what
this admirer appeared to suppose. Sherringham had seen the house the
night before and would recognise that, though good, it was very far from
great. She had done very well, it was all right, but she had never gone
above a point which Dashwood expressed in pounds sterling, to the
edification of his companion, who vaguely thought the figure high. Peter
remembered that he had been unable to get a stall, but Dashwood insisted
that "Miriam" had not leaped into commanding fame: that was a thing that
never happened in fact--it happened only in grotesque works of fiction.
She had attracted notice, unusual notice for a woman whose name, the day
before, had never been heard of: she was recognised as having, for a
novice, extraordinary cleverness and confidence--in addition to her
looks, of course, which were the thing that had really fetched the
crowd. But she hadn't been the talk of London; she had only been the
talk of Gabriel Nash. He wasn't London, more was the pity. He knew the
esthetic people--the worldly, semi-smart ones, not the frumpy, sickly
lot who wore dirty drapery; and the esthetic people had run after her.
Mr. Dashwood sketchily instructed the pilgrim from Paris as to the
different sects in the great religion of beauty, and was able to give
him the particular "note" of the critical clique to which Miriam had
begun so quickly to owe it that she had a vogue. The information made
our friend feel very ignorant of the world, very uninitiated and buried
in his little professional hole. Dashwood warned him that it would be a
long time before the general public would wake up to Miss Rooth, even
after she had waked up to herself; she would have to do some really big
thing first. _They_ knew it was in her, the big thing--Peter and he and
even poor Nash--because they had seen her as no one else had; but London
never took any one on trust--it had to be cash down. It would take their
young lady two or three years to pay out her cash and get her
equivalent. But of course the equivalent would be simply a gold-mine.
Within its limits, however, certainly, the mark she had made was already
quite a fairy-tale: there was magic in the way she had concealed from
the first her want of experience. She absolutely made you think she had
a lot of it, more than any one else. Mr. Dashwood repeated several times
that she was a cool hand--a deucedly cool hand, and that he watc