Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/83

Rh away. I thought over constantly what you said. I didn't understand it much at the time—I was so stupid. But it all came to me later."

"I wish you could see yourself," Sherringham answered.

"My dear fellow, I do. What do you take me for? I didn't miss a vibration of my voice, a fold of my robe."

"I didn't see you looking," Sherringham returned.

"No one ever will. Do you think I would show it?"

"Ars celare artem," Basil Dashwood jocosely dropped.

"You must first have the art to hide," said Sherringham, wondering a little why Miriam didn't introduce her young friend to him. She was, however, both then and later, perfectly neglectful of such cares, never thinking or heeding how other people got on together. When she found they didn't get on she laughed at them: that was the nearest she came to arranging for them. Sherringham observed, from the moment she felt her strength, the immense increase of her goodhumoured inattention to detail—all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to sacrifice holocausts of feelings, when the feelings were other people's. This conferred on her a kind of profanity, an absence of ceremony in her social relations, which was both amusing, because it suggested that she would take what she gave, and formidable, because it was inconvenient and you might not care to give what she would take.

"If you haven't got any art it's not quite the same as if you didn't hide it, is it?" asked Basil Dashwood.

"That's right—say one of your clever things!" murmured Miriam, sweetly, to the young man.