but it
was exactly because he had got his price that he was there. "Come and
see me three or four hours hence," Miriam said--"come, that is, about
six. I shall rest till then, but I want particularly to talk with you.
There will be no one else--not the tip of any tiresome nose. You'll do
me good." So of course he drove up at six.

XLI

"I don't know; I haven't the least idea; I don't care; don't ask
me!"--it was so he met some immediate appeal of her artistic egotism,
some challenge of his impression of her at this and that moment. Hadn't
she frankly better give up such and such a point and return to their
first idea, the one they had talked over so much? Peter replied to this
that he disowned all ideas; that at any rate he should never have
another as long as he lived, and that, so help him heaven, they had
worried that hard bone more than enough.

"You're tired of me--yes, already," she said sadly and kindly. They were
alone, her mother had not peeped out and she had prepared herself to
return to the Strand. "However, it doesn't matter and of course your
head's full of other things. You must think me ravenously
selfish--perpetually chattering about my vulgar shop. What will you have
when one's a vulgar shop-girl? You used to like it, but then you weren't
an ambassador."

"What do you know about my being a minister?" he asked, leaning back in
his chair and showing sombre eyes. Sometimes he held her handsomer on
the stage than off, and sometimes he reversed that judgement. The former
of these convictions had held his mind in the morning, and it was now
punctually followed by the other. As soon as she stepped on the boards
a great and special alteration usually took place in her--she was in
focus and in her frame; yet there were hours too in which she wore her
world's face before the audience, just as there were hours when she wore
her stage face in the world. She took up either mask as it suited her
humour. To-day he was seeing each in its order and feeling each the
best. "I should know very little if I waited for you to tell me--that's
very certain," Miriam returned. "It's in the papers that you've got a
high appointment, but I don't read the papers unless there's something
in them about myself. Next week I shall devour them and think them, no
doubt, inane. It was Basil told me this afternoon of your promotion--he
had seen it announced somewhere, I'm delighted if it gives you more
money and more advantages