ill the curtain had fallen on the last act, that in spite
of the high beauty of that part of the performance of which Miriam
carried the weight there were moments when his relief overflowed into
gasps, as if he had been scrambling up the bank of a torrent after an
immersion. The girl herself, out in the open of her field to win, was of
the incorruptible faith: she had been saturated to good purpose with the
great spirit of Madame Carre. That was conspicuous while the play went
on and she guarded the whole march with fagged piety and passion.
Sherringham had never liked the piece itself; he held that as barbarous
in form and false in feeling it did little honour to the British
theatre; he despised many of the speeches, pitied Miriam for having to
utter them, and considered that, lighted by that sort of candle, the
path of fame might very well lead nowhere.

When the ordeal was over he went behind again, where in the
rose-coloured satin of the silly issue the heroine of the occasion said
to him: "Fancy my having to drag through that other stuff to-night--the
brutes!" He was vague about the persons designated in this allusion, but
he let it pass: he had at the moment a kind of detached foreboding of
the way any gentleman familiarly connected with her in the future would
probably form the habit of letting objurgations and some other things
pass. This had become indeed now a frequent state of mind with him; the
instant he was before her, near her, next her, he found himself a
helpless subject of the spell which, so far at least as he was
concerned, she put forth by contact and of which the potency was
punctual and absolute: the fit came on, as he said, exactly as some
esteemed express-train on a great line bangs at a given moment into the
station. At a distance he partly recovered himself--that was the
encouragement for going to the shaky republic; but as soon as he entered
her presence his life struck him as a thing disconnected from his will.
It was as if he himself had been one thing and his behaviour another; he
had shining views of this difference, drawn as they might be from the
coming years--little illustrative scenes in which he saw himself in
strange attitudes of resignation, always rather sad and still and with a
slightly bent head. Such images should not have been inspiring, but it
is a fact that they were something to go upon. The gentleman with the
bent head had evidently given up something that was dear to him,