Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/199

Rh agreeable to him, and he asked nothing more than to make it last and go further. The impulse to draw her out was irresistible, to encourage her to show herself to the end; for if he was really destined to take her career in hand he counted on some pleasant equivalent—such, for instance, as that she should at least amuse him.

"It's very singular; I know nothing like it," he said—"your equal mastery of two languages."

"Say of half a dozen," Miriam smiled.

"Oh, I don't believe in the others to the same degree. I don't imagine that, with all deference to your undeniable facility, you would be judged fit to address a German or an Italian audience in their own tongue. But you might a French, perfectly, and they are the most particular of all; for their idiom is supersensitive and they are incapable of enduring the baragouinage of foreigners, to which we listen with such complacency. In fact, your French is better than your English—it's more conventional; there are little queernesses and impurities in your English, as if you had lived abroad too much. Ah, you must work that."

"I'll work it with you. I like the way you speak."

"You must speak beautifully; you must do something for the standard."

"For the standard?"

"There isn't any, after all; it has gone to the dogs."

"Oh, I'll bring it back. I know what you mean."

"No one knows, no one cares; the sense is gone—it isn't in the public," Sherringham continued, ventilating a grievance he was rarely able to forget, the vision of which now suddenly