her?" her mother eagerly asked.
"Dear madam, I must hear her first, and hear what Madame Carré says."
"She has a voice of rare beauty, and I understand voices," said Mrs. Rooth.
"Ah then if she has intelligence she has every gift."
"She has a most poetic mind," the old lady went on.
"I should like to paint her portrait; she's made for that," Nick Dormer ventured to observe to Mrs. Rooth; partly because struck with the girl's suitability for sitting, partly to mitigate the crudity of inexpressive spectatorship.
"So all the artists say. I've had three or four heads of her, if you would like to see them: she has been done in several styles. If you were to do her I'm sure it would make her celebrated."
"And me too," Nick easily laughed.
"It would indeed—a member of Parliament!" Nash declared.
"Ah, I have the honour–?" murmured Mrs. Rooth, looking gratified and mystified.
Nick explained that she had no honour at all, and meanwhile Madame Carré had been questioning the girl "Chère madame, I can do nothing with your daughter: she knows too much!" she broke out. "It's a pity, because I like to catch them wild."
"Oh she's wild enough, if that's all! And that's the very point, the question of where to try," Mrs. Rooth went on. "Into what do I launch her—upon what dangerous stormy sea? I've thought of it so anxiously."
"Try here—try the French public: they're so much the most serious," said Gabriel Nash.
"Ah no, try the English: there's such a rare opening!" Sherringham urged in quick opposition.
"Oh it isn't the public, dear gentlemen. It's the private side, the other people—it's the life, it's the moral atmosphere."
"Je ne connais qu'une scène,—la nôtre," Madame Carré declared. "I'm assured by every one who knows that there's no other."
"Very correctly assured," said Mr. Nash. "The theatre in our countries is puerile and barbarous."
"There's something to be done for it, and perhaps mademoiselle's the person to do it," Sherringham contentiously suggested.
"Ah but, en attendant, what can it do for her?" Madame Carré asked.
"Well, anything I can help to bring about," said Peter Sherringham, more and more struck with the girl's rich type. Miriam Rooth sat in silence while this discussion went on, looking from one speaker to the other with a strange dependent candour.
"Ah, if your part's marked out I congratulate you, mademoiselle!"—and the old actress underlined the words as she had often underlined others on the stage. She smiled with large permissiveness on the young aspirant, who appeared not to understand her. Her tone penetrated, however, to certain depths in the mother's nature, adding another stir to agitated waters.
"I feel the responsibility of what she shall find in the life, the standards, of the theatre," Mrs. Rooth explained. "Where is the purest tone—where are the highest standards? That's what I ask," the good lady continued with a misguided intensity which elicited a peal of unceremonious but sociable laughter from Gabriel Nash.
"The purest tone—qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" Madame Carré demanded in the finest manner of modern comedy.
"We're very, very respectable," Mrs. Rooth went on, but now smiling and achieving lightness too.
"What I want is to place my daughter where the conduct—and the picture of conduct in which she should take part—wouldn't be quite absolutely dreadful. Now, chère madame, how about all that; how about conduct in the French theatre—all the things she should see, the things she should hear, the things she should learn?"
Her hostess took it, as Sherringham felt, de très-haut. "I don't think I know what you're talking about. They're the things she may see and hear and learn everywhere; only they're better done, they're better said, above all they're better taught. The only conduct that concerns an, actress, it seems to me, is her own, and the only way for her to behave herself is not to be a helpless stick. I know no other conduct."
"But there are characters, there are situations, which I don't think I should like to see her undertake."
"There are many, no doubt, which she would do well to leave alone!" laughed the Frenchwoman.
"I shouldn't like to see her represent a very bad woman—a really bad one," Mrs. Rooth serenely pursued.
"Ah in England then, and in your theatre, every one's immaculately good? Your plays must be even more ingenious than I supposed!"
"We haven't any plays," said Gabriel Nash.
"People will write them for Miss Rooth—it will be a new era," Sherringham threw in with wanton, or at least with combative, optimism.
"Will you, sir—will you do something? A sketch of one of our grand English ideals?" the old lady asked engagingly.
"Oh I know what you do with our pieces—to show your superior virtue!" Madame Carré cried before he had time to reply that he wrote nothing but diplomatic memoranda. "Bad women? Je n'ai joué que ça, madame. 'Really' bad? I tried to make them real!"
"I can say 'L'Aventurière,'" Miriam interrupted in a cold voice which seemed to hint at a want of participation in the maternal solicitudes.
"Allow us the pleasure of hearing you then. Madame Carré will give you the réplique," said Peter Sherringham.
"Certainly, my child; I can say it without the book," Madame Carré responded. "Put yourself there—move that chair a little away." She patted her young visitor, encouraging her to rise, settling with her the scene they should take, while the three men sprang up to arrange a place for the performance. Miriam left her seat and looked vaguely about her; then having taken off her hat and given it to her mother she stood on the designated spot with her eyes to the ground. Abruptly, however, instead of beginning the scene, Madame Carré turned to the elder lady with an air which showed that a rejoinder to this visitor's remarks of a moment before had been gathering force in her breast.
"You mix things up, chère madame, and I have it on my heart to tell you so. I believe it's rather the case with you other English, and I've never been able to learn that either your morality or your talent is the gainer by it. To be too respectable to go where things are done best is in my opinion to be very vicious indeed; and to do them badly in order to preserve your virtue is to fall into a grossness more shocking than any other. To do them well is virtue enough, and not to make a mess of it the only respectability. That's hard enough to merit Paradise. Everything else is base humbug! Voilà, chère madame, the answer I have for your scruples!"
"It's admirable—admirable; and I am glad my friend Dormer here has had the great advantage of hearing you utter it!" Nash exclaimed with a free designation of Nick.
That young man thought it in effect a speech denoting an intelligence of the question, yet he rather resented the idea that Gabriel should assume it would strike him as a revelation; and to show his familiarity with the line of thought it indicated, as well as to play his part appreciatively in the little circle, he observed to Mrs. Rooth, as if they might take many things for granted: "In other words, your daughter must find her safeguard in the artistic conscience." But he had no sooner spoken
