e admired a great artist more than anything
in the world; and in the presence of art, of _great_ art, her heart beat
so fast." Her manners were not perfect, and the friction of a varied
experience had rather roughened than smoothed her. She said nothing that
proved her intelligent, even though he guessed this to be the design of
two or three of her remarks; but he parted from her with the suspicion
that she was, according to the contemporary French phrase, a "nature."

The Hotel de la Garonne was in a small unrenovated street in which the
cobble-stones of old Paris still flourished, lying between the Avenue de
l'Opera and the Place de la Bourse. Sherringham had occasionally
traversed the high dimness, but had never noticed the tall, stale
_maison meublee_, the aspect of which, that of a third-rate provincial
inn, was an illustration of Mrs. Rooth's shrunken standard. "We would
ask you to come up, but it's quite at the top and we haven't a
sitting-room," the poor lady bravely explained. "We had to receive Mr.
Nash at a cafe."

Nick Dormer declared that he liked cafes, and Miriam, looking at his
cousin, dropped with a flash of passion the demand: "Do you wonder I
should want to do something--so that we can stop living like pigs?"

Peter recognised the next day that though it might be boring to listen
to her it was better to make her recite than to let her do nothing, so
effectually did the presence of his sister and that of Lady Agnes, and
even of Grace and Biddy, appear, by a strange tacit opposition, to
deprive hers, ornamental as it was, of a reason. He had only to see them
all together to perceive that she couldn't pass for having come to
"meet" them--even her mother's insinuating gentility failed to put the
occasion on that footing--and that she must therefore be assumed to have
been brought to show them something. She was not subdued, not colourless
enough to sit there for nothing, or even for conversation--the sort of
conversation that was likely to come off--so that it was inevitable to
treat her position as connected with the principal place on the carpet,
with silence and attention and the pulling together of chairs. Even when
so established it struck him at first as precarious, in the light, or
the darkness, of the inexpressive faces of the other ladies, seated in
couples and rows on sofas--there were several in addition to Julia and
the Dormers; mainly the wives, with their husbands, of Sherringham's
fellow-