Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/230

222 night before; would recognize that, though good, it was very far from great. She had done very well, very well indeed, but she had never gone above a point which Dashwcod expressed in pounds sterling, to the edification of his companion, who vaguely thought the figure high. Sherringham remembered that he had been unable to get a stall, but Dashwood insisted that the girl had not leaped into commanding fame: that was a thing that never happened in fact—it happened only in pretentious works of fiction. She had attracted notice, unusual notice for a woman whose name the day before had never been heard of: she was recognized as having, for a novice, extraordinary cleverness and confidence—in addition to her looks of course, which were the thing that had really fetched the crowd. But she hadn't been the talk of London; she had only been the talk of Gabriel Nash. He wasn't London, more was the pity. He knew the æsthetic people—the worldly, semi-smart ones, not the frumpy, sickly lot who wore dirty drapery; and the æsthetic people had run after her. Basil Dashwood instructed Sherringham sketchily as to the different sects in the great religion of beauty, and was able to give him the particular "note" of the critical clique to which Miriam had begun so quickly to owe it that she had a vogue. The information made the secretary of embassy feel very ignorant of the world, very uninitiated and buried in his little professional hole. Dashwood warned him that it would be a long time before the general public would wake up to Miss Rooth, even after she had waked up to herself: she would have to do some really big thing first. They knew it was in her, the big thing—Sherringham and he,