Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/245

Rh revolve and change and never fail, was a corrective to the depression, the humiliation, the bewilderment of life. It transported Sherringham from the vulgar hour and the ugly fact; drew him to something which had no reason but its sweetness, no name nor place save as the pure, the distant, the antique. It was what most made him say to himself: "Oh, hang it, what does it matter?" when he reflected that an homme sérieux (as they said in Paris) rather gave himself away (as they said in America) by going every night to the same theatre for all the world to stare. It was what kept him from doing anything but hover round Miriam—kept him from paying any other visits, from attending to any business, from going back to Calcutta Gardens. It was a spell which he shrank intensely from breaking, and the cause of a hundred postponements, confusions and incoherences. It made of the crooked little stucco villa in St. John's Wood a place in the upper air, commanding the prospect; a nest of winged liberties and ironies, hanging far aloft above the huddled town. One should live at altitudes when one could—they braced and simplified; and for a happy interval Sherringham never touched the earth.

It was not that there were no influences tending at moments to drag him down—an abasement from which he escaped only because he was up so high. We have seen that Basil Dashwood could affect him at times like a piece of wood tied to his ankle, through the circumstance that he made Miriam's famous conditions—those of the public exhibition of her genius—seem small and prosaic; so that Sherringham had to remind himself that perhaps this smallness was involved in