mendous things done that she
might use them, but she didn't pretend to say exactly what they were to
be, nor even approximately how they were to be handled: her ground was
rather that if _she_ only had a pen--it was exasperating to have to
explain! She mainly contented herself with the view that nothing had
really been touched: she felt that more and more as she saw more of
people's goings-on.

Peter went to her theatre again that evening and indeed made no scruple
of going every night for a week. Rather perhaps I should say he made a
scruple, but a high part of the pleasure of his life during these
arbitrary days was to overcome it. The only way to prove he could
overcome it was to go; and he was satisfied, after he had been seven
times, not only with the spectacle on the stage but with his perfect
independence. He knew no satiety, however, with the spectacle on the
stage, which induced for him but a further curiosity. Miriam's
performance was a thing alive, with a power to change, to grow, to
develop, to beget new forms of the same life. Peter contributed to it in
his amateurish way and watched with solicitude the effect of his care
and the fortune of his hints. He talked it over in Balaklava Place,
suggested modifications and variations worth trying. She professed
herself thankful for any refreshment that could be administered to her
interest in _Yolande_, and with an energy that showed large resource
touched up her part and drew several new airs from it. Peter's
liberties bore on her way of uttering certain speeches, the intonations
that would have more beauty or make the words mean more. She had her
ideas, or rather she had her instincts, which she defended and
illustrated, with a vividness superior to argument, by a happy pictorial
phrase or a snatch of mimicry; but she was always for trying; she liked
experiments and caught at them, and she was especially thankful when
some one gave her a showy reason, a plausible formula, in a case where
she only stood on an intuition. She pretended to despise reasons and to
like and dislike at her sovereign pleasure; but she always honoured the
exotic gift, so that Sherringham was amused with the liberal way she
produced it, as if she had been a naked islander rejoicing in a present
of crimson cloth.

Day after day he spent most of his time in her society, and Miss Laura
Lumley's recent habitation became the place in London to which his
thoughts and his steps were most attach