life of so violent a rhythm: one might as
well be hooked to a Catharine-wheel and whiz round in flame and smoke.

It had only been for five minutes, in the wing, amid jostling and
shuffling and shoving, that they held this conference. Miriam, splendid
in a brocaded anachronism, a false dress of the beginning of the
century, and excited and appealing, imperious, reckless and
good-humoured, full of exaggerated propositions, supreme determinations
and comic irrelevancies, showed as radiant a young head as the stage had
ever seen. Other people quickly surrounded her, and Peter saw that
though, she wanted, as she said, a fresh ear and a fresh eye she was
liable to rap out to those who possessed these advantages that they
didn't know what they were talking about. It was rather hard for her
victims--Basil Dashwood let him into this, wonderfully painted and in a
dress even more beautiful than Miriam's, that of a young dandy under
Charles the Second: if you were not in the business you were one kind
of donkey and if you _were_ in the business you were another kind. Peter
noted with a certain chagrin that Gabriel Nash had failed; he preferred
to base his annoyance on that ground when the girl, after the remark
just quoted from Dashwood, laughing and saying that at any rate the
thing would do because it would just have to do, thrust vindictively but
familiarly into the young actor's face a magnificent feather fan. "Isn't
he too lovely," she asked, "and doesn't he know how to do it?" Dashwood
had the sense of costume even more than Peter had inferred or supposed
he minded, inasmuch as it now appeared he had gone profoundly into the
question of what the leading lady was to wear. He had drawn patterns and
hunted up stuffs, had helped her to try on her clothes, had bristled
with ideas and pins. It would not have been quite clear, Peter's ground
for resenting Nash's cynical absence; it may even be thought singular he
should have missed him. At any rate he flushed a little when their young
woman, of whom he inquired whether she hadn't invited her oldest and
dearest friend, made answer: "Oh he says he doesn't like the
kitchen-fire--he only wants the pudding!" It would have taken the
kitchen-fire to account at that point for the red of Sherringham's
cheek; and he was indeed uncomfortably heated by helping to handle, as
he phrased it, the saucepans.

This he felt so much after he had returned to his seat, which he forbore
to quit again t