Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/228

220 end of the season; they had seen for a month past that they would have to put on something else. Miss Rooth moreover wanted a new part; she was impatient to show what a range she was capable of. She had grand ideas; she thought herself very good-natured to repeat the same thing for three months. Basil Dashwood lighted another cigarette and described to his companion some of Miss Rooth's ideas. He gave Sherringham a great deal of information about her—about her character, her temper, her peculiarities, her little ways, her manner of producing some of her effects. He spoke with familiarity and confidence, as if he knew more about her than any one else—as if he had invented or discovered her, were in a sense her proprietor or guarantor. It was the talk of the shop, with a perceptible shrewdness in it and a touching young candour; the expansiveness of the commercial spirit when it relaxes and generalizes, is conscious it is safe with another member of the guild.

Sherringham could not help protesting against the lame old war-horse whom it was proposed to bring into action, who had been ridden to death and had saved a thousand desperate fields; and he exclaimed on the strange passion of the good British public for sitting again and again through expected situations, watching for speeches they had heard and surprises that struck the hour. Dashwood defended the taste of London, praised it as loyal, constant, faithful; to which Sherringham retorted with some vivacity that it was faithful to rubbish. He justified this sally by declaring that the play in rehearsal was rubbish, clumsy mediocrity which had outlived its convenience, and that the fault was the want of life in the critical