to outsiders; and Miriam told anecdotes and gave
imitations of the people she would have met if she had gone out, so that
no one had a sense of loss--the two occasions were fantastically united.
Mrs. Rooth drank champagne for consolation, though the consolation was
imperfect when she remembered she might have drunk it, though not quite
so much perhaps, in Cromwell Road.

Taken in connection with the evening before, the day formed for our
friend the most complete exhibition of his young woman he had yet
enjoyed. He had been at the theatre, to which the Saturday night
happened to have brought the very fullest house she had played to, and
he came early to Balaklava Place, to tell her once again--he had told
her half-a-dozen times the evening before--that with the excitement of
her biggest audience she had surpassed herself, acted with remarkable
intensity. It pleased her to hear this, and the spirit with which she
interpreted the signs of the future and, during an hour he spent alone
with her, Mrs. Rooth being upstairs and Basil Dashwood luckily absent,
treated him to twenty specimens of feigned passion and character, was
beyond any natural abundance he had yet seen in a woman. The impression
could scarcely have been other if she had been playing wild snatches to
him at the piano: the bright up-darting flame of her talk rose and fell
like an improvisation on the keys. Later, the rest of the day, he could
as little miss the good grace with which she fraternised with her
visitors, finding always the fair word for each--the key to a common
ease, the right turn to keep vanity quiet and make humility brave. It
was a wonderful expenditure of generous, nervous life. But what he read
in it above all was the sense of success in youth, with the future loose
and big, and the action of that charm on the faculties. Miriam's limited
past had yet pinched her enough to make emancipation sweet, and the
emancipation had come at last in an hour. She had stepped into her magic
shoes, divined and appropriated everything they could help her to,
become in a day a really original contemporary. He was of course not
less conscious of that than Nick Dormer had been when in the cold light
of his studio this more detached observer saw too how she had altered.

But the great thing to his mind, and during these first days the
irresistible seduction of the theatre, was that she was a rare
revelation of beauty. Beauty was the principle of everything she