did and
of the way she unerringly did it--an exquisite harmony of line and
motion and attitude and tone, what was at once most general and most
special in her performance. Accidents and instincts played together to
this end and constituted something that was independent of her talent
or of her merit in a given case, and which as a value to Peter's
imagination was far superior to any merit and any talent. He could but
call it a felicity and an importance incalculable, and but know that it
connected itself with universal values. To see this force in operation,
to sit within its radius and feel it shift and revolve and change and
never fail, was a corrective to the depression, the humiliation, the
bewilderment of life. It transported our troubled friend from the vulgar
hour and the ugly fact; drew him to something that had no warrant but
its sweetness, no name nor place save as the pure, the remote, the
antique. It was what most made him say to himself "Oh hang it, what does
it matter?" when he reflected that an _homme serieux_, as they said in
Paris, rather gave himself away, as they said in America, by going every
night to the same sordid stall at which all the world might stare. It
was what kept him from doing anything but hover round Miriam--kept him
from paying any other visits, from attending to any business, from going
back to Calcutta Gardens. It was a spell he shrank intensely from
breaking and the cause of a hundred postponements, confusions, and
absurdities. It put him in a false position altogether, but it made of
the crooked little stucco villa in Saint John's Wood a place in the
upper air, commanding the prospect; a nest of winged liberties and
ironies far aloft above the huddled town. One should live at altitudes
when one could--they braced and simplified; and for a happy interval he
never touched the earth.

It was not that there were no influences tending at moments to drag him
down--an abasement from which he escaped only because he was up so high.
We have seen that Basil Dashwood could affect him at times as a chunk of
wood tied to his ankle--this through the circumstance that he made
Miriam's famous conditions, those of the public exhibition of her
genius, seem small and prosaic; so that Peter had to remind himself how
much this smallness was perhaps involved in their being at all. She
carried his imagination off into infinite spaces, whereas she carried
Dashwood's only into the box-office and the reviv