er. She had
learned it, practised it, rehearsed it to her mother, and had now been
childishly eager to show what she could do with it. What she mainly did
was to reproduce with a crude fidelity, but in extraordinary detail, the
intonations, the personal quavers and cadences of her model.

"How bad you make me seem to myself and if I were you how much better I
should say it!" was Madame Carre's first criticism.

Miriam allowed her, however, little time to develop it, for she broke
out, at the shortest intervals, with the several other specimens of
verse to which the old actress had handed her the key. They were all
fine lyrics, of tender or ironic intention, by contemporary poets, but
depending for effect on taste and art, a mastery of the rare shade and
the right touch, in the interpreter. Miriam had gobbled them up, and she
gave them forth in the same way as the first, with close, rude,
audacious mimicry. There was a moment for Sherringham when it might have
been feared their hostess would see in the performance a designed
burlesque of her manner, her airs and graces, her celebrated simpers and
grimaces, so extravagant did it all cause these refinements to appear.
When it was over the old woman said, "Should you like now to hear how
_you_ do?" and, without waiting for an answer, phrased and trilled the
last of the pieces, from beginning to end, exactly as her visitor had
done, making this imitation of an imitation the drollest thing
conceivable. If she had suffered from the sound of the girl's echo it
was a perfect revenge. Miriam had dropped on a sofa, exhausted, and she
stared at first, flushed and wild; then she frankly gave way to
pleasure, to interest and large laughter. She said afterwards, to defend
herself, that the verses in question, and indeed all those she had
recited, were of the most difficult sort: you had to do them; they
didn't do themselves--they were things in which the _gros moyens_ were
of no avail.

"Ah my poor child, your means are all _gros moyens_; you appear to have
no others," Madame Carre replied. "You do what you can, but there are
people like that; it's the way they're made. They can never come nearer
to fine truth, to the just indication; shades don't exist for them, they
don't see certain differences. It was to show you a difference that I
repeated that thing as you repeat it, as you represent my doing it. If
you're struck with the little the two ways have in common so much the
better