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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Never mind I'll look after them," Sherringham laughed. "And how can Madame Carré judge if the girl recites English?" "She's so intelligent that she could judge if she recited Chinese," Peter declared. "That's true, but the jeune Anglaise recites also in French," said Gabriel Nash. "Then she isn't stupid." "And in Italian, and in several more tongues, for aught I know."
Sherringham wondered if her mother had not at any rate taught her that phrase he thought it highly probable. "It would give on my nerves, the life I lead her," Miriam continued; "but she's really a delicious woman."
His answer to this was simply that the purchaser was so little of a stranger that it didn't go, so to speak, out of the family, out of hers. It didn't matter, Miriam's retort that if Mr. Sherringham had formerly been no stranger he was utterly one now, so that nothing would ever less delight him than to see her hated image on his wall.
The next instant, however, she added in a different voice, "Oh Peter!" for, with an air of eagerness, a gentleman was walking up to them. "How d'ye do, Cousin Agnes? How d'ye do, little Grace?" Peter Sherringham laughed and shook hands with them, and three minutes later was settled in his chair at their table, on which the first elements of the meal had been placed.
Peter Sherringham already knew how she managed this miracle, but every visit he paid her added to his amused, charmed sense that it was a miracle and that his extraordinary old friend had seen things he should never, never see. Those were just the things he wanted to see most, and her duration, her survival, cheated him agreeably and helped him a little to guess them.
I never "go behind" Miriam; only poor Sherringham goes, a great deal, and Nick Dormer goes a little, and the author, while they so waste wonderment, goes behind them: but none the less she is as thoroughly symbolic, as functional, for illustration of the idea, as either of them, while her image had seemed susceptible of a livelier and "prettier" concretion.
She had never been chary of this particular displeasure, and there were moments it was an old story and a subject of frank raillery to Sherringham when to hear her you might have thought there was no cleverness anywhere but in her own splendid impatience.
Even a hansom that loitered across the end of the vista turned a sceptical back upon it, so that Sherringham had to lift his voice in a loud appeal. He stood with Biddy watching the cab approach them. "This is one of the charming things you'll remember," she said, turning her eyes to the general dreariness from the particular figure of the vehicle, which was antiquated and clumsy.
She moved altogether in a world of elegant fable and fancy, and Sherringham had to live there with her for Miriam's sake, live there in sociable, vulgar assent and despite his feeling it rather a low neighbourhood. He was at a loss how to take what she said she talked sweetly and discursively of so many things till he simply noted that he could only take it always for untrue.
The night Peter Sherringham walked away from Balaklava Place with Gabriel Nash the talk of the two men directed itself, as was natural at the time, to the question of Miriam's future fame and the pace, as Nash called it, at which she would go.
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