Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/222

214 was a manner to which her companions found it impossible to respond. Miss Tressilian was disappointed in nothing but their enjoyment: they didn't seem to think the exhibition as amusing as she.

Walking away through the ordered void of Lady Agnes's quarter, with the four acts of the play glowing again before him in the smokeless London night, Sherringham found the liveliest thing in his impression the certitude that if he had never seen Miriam before and she had had for him none of the advantages of association, he would still have recognized in her performance the most interesting thing that the theatre had ever offered him. He floated in a sense of the felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a thing perfectly done, in the almost aggressive bravery of still larger claims for an art which could so triumphantly, so exquisitely render life. "Render it?" Peter said to himself. "Create it and reveal it, rather; give us something new and large and of the first order!" He had seen Miriam now; he had never seen her before; he had never seen her till he saw her in her conditions. Oh, her conditions—there were many things to be said about them; they were paltry enough as yet, inferior, inadequate, obstructive, as compared with the right, full, finished setting of such a talent; but the essence of them was now irremovably in Sherringham's eye, the vision of how the uplifted stage and the listening house transformed her. That idea of her having no character of her own came back to him with a force that made him laugh in the empty street: this was a disadvantage she was so exempt from that he appeared to himself not to have known her till to-night. Her character