Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/207

Rh "We are very frivolous, the way we chatter. What you want to do, to get your foot in the stirrup, is supremely difficult. There is everything to overcome. You have neither an engagement nor the prospect of an engagement."

"Oh, you'll get me one!" Miriam's manner expressed that this was so certain that it was not worth dilating upon; so instead of dilating she inquired abruptly, a second time: "Why do you think I'm so simple?"

"I don't then. Didn't I tell you just now that you were extraordinary? That's the term moreover that you applied to yourself when you came to see me—when you said a girl had to be, to wish to go on the stage. It remains the right one, and your simplicity doesn't mitigate it. What's rare in you is that you have—as I suspect, at least—no nature of your own." Miriam listened to this as if she were preparing to argue with it or not, only as it should strike her as being a pleasing picture; but as yet, naturally, she failed to understand. "You are always playing something; there are no intervals. It's the absence of intervals, of a fond or background, that I don't comprehend. You're an embroidery without a canvas."

"Yes, perhaps," the girl replied, with her head on one side, as if she were looking at the pattern. "But I'm very honest."

"You can't be everything, a consummate actress and a flower of the field. You've got to choose."

She looked at him a moment. "I'm glad you think I'm so wonderful."

"Your feigning may be honest, in the sense that your only feeling is your feigned one," Sherringham went on. "That's