Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/175

Rh a simpleton, with your false simplifications! You were made to charm and console, to represent beauty and harmony and variety to miserable human beings; and the daily life of man is the theatre for that—not a vulgar shop with a turnstile, that's open only once in the twenty-four hours. Without it, verily?" Sherringham went on, with rising scorn and exasperated passion. "Please let me know the first time you're without your face, without your voice, your step, your exquisite spirit, the turn of your head and the wonder of your eye!"

Miriam, at. this, moved away from him with a port that resembled what she sometimes showed on the stage when she turned her young back upon the footlights and then, after a few steps, grandly swept round again. This evolution she performed (it was over in an instant) on the present occasion; even to stopping short with her eyes upon him and her head erect. "Surely it's strange," she said, "the way the other solution never occurs to you."

"The other solution?"

"That you should stay on the stage."

"I don't understand you," Sherringham confessed.

"Stay on my stage; come off your own."

Sherringham hesitated a moment. "You mean that if I'll do that you'll have me?"

"I mean that if it were to occur to you to offer me a little sacrifice on your own side, it might place the matter in a slightly more attractive light."

"Continue to let you act—as my wife?" Sherringham demanded. "Is it a real condition? Am I to understand that those are your terms?"