Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/80

72 himself in the flurry she stared with surprise and then broke out: "Ah, the idiots!" She eventually became in her judgments, in impatience and the expression of contempt, very free and absolutely irreverent.

"What a splendid scolding!" Sherringham exclaimed when, on the entrance of the Pope's legate, her companion closed the book upon the scene. Peter pressed his lips to Madame Carré's finger-tips; the old actress got up and held out her arms to Miriam. The girl never took her eyes off Sherringham while she passed into Madame Carré's embrace and remained there. They were full of their usual sombre fire, and it was always the case that they expressed too much anything that they expressed at all; but they were not defiant nor even triumphant now—they were only deeply explicative; they seemed to say: "That's the sort of thing I meant; that's what I had in mind when I asked you to try to do something for me." Madame Carré folded her pupil to her bosom, holding her there as the old marquise in a comédie de moeurs might, in the last scene, have held her god-daughter the ingénue.

"Have you got me an engagement?" Miriam asked of Sherringham. "Yes, he has done something splendid for me," she went on to Madame Carré, resting her hand caressingly on one of the actress's while the old woman discoursed with Mr. Dashwood, who was telling her in very pretty French that he was tremendously excited about Miss Rooth. Madame Carré looked at him as if she wondered how he appeared when he was calm and how, as a dramatic artist, he expressed that condition.

"Yes, yes, something splendid, for a beginning,"