Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/212

204 behind Miriam at the play and looked over her shoulder at the stage: her observation being so keen and her comments so unexpected in their vivacity that his curiosity was refreshed and his attention stretched beyond its wont. If the spectacle before the footlights had now lost much of its annual brilliancy, the fashion in which Miriam followed it came near being spectacle enough. Moreover, in most cases the attendance of the little party was at the Théâtre Français; and it has been sufficiently indicated that Sherringham, though the child of a sceptical age and the votary of a cynical science, was still candid enough to take the serious, the religious view of that establishment—the view of M. Sarcey and of the unregenerate provincial mind. "In the trade that I follow we see things too much in the hard light of reason, of calculation," he once remarked to his young protégée; "but it's good for the mind to keep up a superstition or two: it leaves a margin, like having a second horse to your brougham for night-work. The arts, the amusements, the æsthetic part of life are night-work, if I may say so without suggesting the nefarious. At any rate you want your second horse—your superstition that stays at home when the sun is high—to go your rounds with. The Théâtre Français is my second horse."

Miriam's appetite for this pleasure showed him vividly enough how rarely, in the past, it had been within her reach; and she pleased him at first by liking everything, seeing almost no differences and taking her deep draught undiluted. She leaned on the edge of the box with bright voracity, tasting to the core yet relishing the surface; watching each movement of each actor, attending to the way each thing was said or