Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/243

Rh good friends at home. She sent off a message—it was a terrible distance—by a cabman, and Sherringham had the privilege of paying the messenger. Basil Dashwood, in another vehicle, proceeded to an hotel that he knew, a mile away, for supplementary provisions, and came back with a cold ham and a dozen of champagne. It was all very Bohemian and journalistic and picturesque, very supposedly droll and enviable to outsiders; and Miriam told anecdotes and gave imitations of the people she would have met if she had gone out: so no one had a sense of loss—the two occasions were fantastically united. Mrs. Rooth drank champagne for consolation; though the consolation was imperfect when she remembered that she might have drunk it (not quite so much indeed) in Cromwell Road.

Taken in connection with the evening before, the day formed for Sherringham the most complete exhibition he had had of Miriam Rooth. He had been at the theatre, to which the Saturday night happened to have brought the fullest house she had yet played to, and he came early to Balaklava Place, to tell her once again (he had told her half a dozen times the evening before) that, with the excitement of her biggest audience, she had surpassed herself, acted with remarkable intensity. It pleased her to hear it, and the spirit with which she interpreted the signs of the future and, during an hour he spent alone with her, Mrs. Rooth being up-stairs and Basil Dashwood not arrived, treated him to specimens of fictive emotion of various kinds, was beyond any natural abundance that he had yet seen in a woman. The impression could scarcely have been other if she had been playing wild snatches