nd miles over my head. He has got something 'on,' as they say;
he's in love with an idea. I think it's a shocking bad one, but that's
his own affair. He's quite _exalte_; living on nectar and ambrosia--what
he has to spare for us poor crawling things on earth is only a few dry
crumbs. I didn't even ask him to come to rehearsal. Besides, he thinks
you're in love with me and that it wouldn't be honourable to cut in.
He's capable of that--isn't it charming?"

"If he were to relent and give up his scruples would you marry him?"
Peter asked.

"Mercy, how you chatter about 'marrying'!" the girl laughed. "_C'est la
maladie anglaise_--you've all got it on the brain."

"Why I put it that way to please you," he explained. "You complained to
me last year precisely that this was not what seemed generally wanted."

"Oh last year!"--she made nothing of that. Then differently, "Yes, it's
very tiresome!" she conceded.

"You told me, moreover, in Paris more than once that you wouldn't listen
to anything but that."

"Well," she declared, "I won't, but I shall wait till I find a husband
who's charming enough and bad enough. One who'll beat me and swindle me
and spend my money on other women--that's the sort of man for me. Mr.
Dormer, delightful as he is, doesn't come up to that."

"You'll marry Basil Dashwood." He spoke it with conviction.

"Oh 'marry'?--call it marry if you like. That's what poor mother
threatens me with--she lives in dread of it."

"To this hour," he mentioned, "I haven't managed to make out what your
mother wants. She has so many ideas, as Madame Carre said."

"She wants me to be some sort of tremendous creature--all her ideas are
reducible to that. What makes the muddle is that she isn't clear about
the creature she wants most. A great actress or a great lady--sometimes
she inclines for one and sometimes for the other, but on the whole
persuading herself that a great actress, if she'll cultivate the right
people, may _be_ a great lady. When I tell her that won't do and that a
great actress can never be anything but a great vagabond, then the dear
old thing has tantrums, and we have scenes--the most grotesque: they'd
make the fortune, for a subject, of some play-writing rascal, if he had
the wit to guess them; which, luckily for us perhaps, he never will. She
usually winds up by protesting--_devinez un peu quoi_!" Miriam added.
And as her companion professed his complete inability to divine: "By
declaring th