Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/94

86 miss you and hold my tongue. I can be disinterested—I can!"

"What did you desire me to come for?" Sherringham asked, attentive and motionless. The same impression, the old impression was with him again; the sense that if she was sincere it was sincerity of execution, if she was genuine it was the genuineness of doing it well. She did it so well now that this very fact was charming and touching. When she asked him at the theatre to grant her the hour in the afternoon, she wanted candidly (the more as she had not seen him at home for several days) to go over with him once again, on the eve of the great night (it would be for her second attempt the critics would lie so in wait—the first success might have been a fluke), some of her recurrent doubts: knowing from experience what good ideas he often had, how he could give a worrying alternative its quietus at the last. Then she had heard from Dashwood of the change in his situation, and that had really from one moment to the other made her think sympathetically of his preoccupations—led her open-handedly to drop her own. She was sorry to lose him and eager to let him know how good a friend she was conscious that he had been to her. But the expression of this was already, at the end of a minute, a strange bedevilment: she began to listen to herself, to speak dramatically, to represent. She uttered the things she felt as if they were snatches of old play-books, and really felt them the more because they sounded so well. This however didn't prevent them from being as good feelings as those of anybody else, and at the moment Sherringham, to still a rising emotion—which he knew he shouldn't still—