Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/82

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Miriam quickly declaimed. "Ah, if you don't feel the way she makes a throne of it!"

"It's really tremendously fine, chère madame," Sherringham said. "There's nothing like it."

"Vous êtes insupportables," the old woman answered. "Stay with us. I'll teach you Phèdre."

"Ah, Phædra—Phædra!" Basil Dashwood vaguely ejaculated, looking more gentlemanly than ever.

"You have learned all I have taught you, but where the devil have you learned what I haven't taught you?" Madame Carré went on.

"I've worked—I have; you'd call it work—all through the bright, late summer, all through the hot, dull, empty days. I've battered down the door—I did hear it crash one day. But I'm not so very good yet: I'm only in the right direction."

"Malicieuse!" murmured Madame Carré.

"Oh, I can beat that," the girl went on.

"Did you wake up one morning and find you had grown a pair of wings?" Sherringham asked. "Because that's what the difference amounts to—you really soar. Moreover you're an angel," he added, charmed with her unexpectedness, the good-nature of her forbearance to reproach him for not having written to her. And it seemed to him privately that she was angelic when in answer to this she said ever so blandly:

"You know you read King John with me before you went