he didn't recognise and puzzled by a mystery he
flattered himself he hadn't heeded. And he was still more ashamed of
being reassured than of being puzzled.

It must be recorded that Miriam's absence from the scene was not
prolonged. Nick, as Sherringham gathered, had been about a quarter of an
hour in the house, which would have given her, gratified by his
presence, due time to array herself to come down to him. At all events
she was in the room, prepared apparently to go to the theatre, very
shortly after one of her guests had become sensible of how glad he was
she was out of it. Familiarity had never yet cured him of a certain
tremor of expectation, and even of suspense, in regard to her entrances;
a flutter caused by the simple circumstance of her infinite variety. To
say she was always acting would too much convey that she was often
fatiguing; since her changing face affected this particular admirer at
least not as a series of masks, but as a response to perceived
differences, an intensity of that perception, or still more as something
richly constructional, like the shifting of the scene in a play or like
a room with many windows. The image she was to project was always
incalculable, but if her present denied her past and declined
responsibility for her future it made a good thing of the hour and kept
the actual peculiarly fresh. This time the actual was a bright, gentle,
graceful, smiling, young woman in a new dress, eager to go out, drawing
on fresh gloves, who looked as if she were about to step into a carriage
and--it was Gabriel Nash who thus formulated her physiognomy--do a lot
of London things.

The young woman had time to spare, however, and she sat down and talked
and laughed and presently gave, as seemed to Peter, a deeper glow to the
tawdry little room, which could do for others if it had to do for her.
She described herself as in a state of nervous muddle, exhausted,
blinded, _abrutie_, with the rehearsals of the forthcoming piece--the
first night was close at hand, and it was going to be of a vileness:
they would all see!--but there was no correspondence between this
account of the matter and her present bravery of mood. She sent her
mother away--to "put on some clothes or something"--and, left alone with
the visitors, went to a long glass between the windows, talking always
to Nick Dormer, and revised and rearranged a little her own attire. She
talked to Nick, over her shoulder, and to Nick only, as