Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/149

Rh "Difficulties are a mild name for them; poison even is a mild name for the ill he suffers from. The principal difficulty is that he doesn't know what he wants. The next is that I don't either—or what I want myself. I only know what I don't want," said Miriam brightly, as if she were uttering some happy, beneficent truth. "I don't want a person who takes things even less simply than I do myself. Mr. Sherringham, poor man, must be very uncomfortable, for one side of him is perpetually fighting against the other side. He's trying to serve God and Mammon, and I don't know how God will come off. What I like in you is that you have definitely let Mammon go—it's the only way. That's my earnest conviction, and yet they call us people light. Poor Mr. Sherringham has tremendous ambitions—tremendous riguardi, as we used to say in Italy. He wants to enjoy every comfort and to save every appearance, and all without making a sacrifice. He expects others—me, for instance—to make all the sacrifices. Merci, much as I esteem him and much as I owe him! I don't know how he ever came to stray at all into our bold, bad Bohemia: it was a cruel trick for fortune to play him. He can't keep out of it, he's perpetually making dashes across the border, and yet he's not in the least at home there. There's another in whose position (if I were in it) I wouldn't look at the likes of us!"

"I don't know much about the matter, but I have an idea Peter thinks he has made, or at least is making, sacrifices."

"So much the better—you must encourage him, you must help him."

"I don't know what my daughter's talking about—she's