expectation, their distinguished friend warmed to the work of
answering and explaining, became interested, was content to keep her and
to talk. Yes, she took her ease; she relieved herself, with the rare
cynicism of the artist--all the crudity, the irony and intensity of a
discussion of esoteric things--of personal mysteries, of methods and
secrets. It was the oddest hour our young man had ever spent, even in
the course of investigations which had often led him into the _cuisine_,
the distillery or back shop, of the admired profession. He got up
several times to come away; then he remained, partly in order not to
leave Miriam alone with her terrible initiatress, partly because he was
both amused and edified, and partly because Madame Carre held him by the
appeal of her sharp, confidential, old eyes, addressing her talk to
himself, with Miriam but a pretext and subject, a vile illustration. She
undressed this young lady, as it were, from head to foot, turned her
inside out, weighed and measured and sounded her: it was all, for
Sherringham, a new revelation of the point to which, in her profession
and nation, an intelligence of the business, a ferocious analysis, had
been carried and a special vocabulary developed. What struck him above
all was the way she knew her grounds and reasons, so that everything was
sharp and clear in her mind and lay under her hand. If she had rare
perceptions she had traced them to their source; she could give an
account of what she did; she knew perfectly why, could explain it,
defend it, amplify it, fight for it: all of which was an intellectual
joy to her, allowing her a chance to abound and insist and discriminate.
There was a kind of cruelty or at least of hardness in it all, to poor
Peter's shy English sense, that sense which can never really reconcile
itself to any question of method and form, and has extraneous sentiments
to "square," to pacify with compromises and superficialities, the
general plea for innocence in everything and often the flagrant proof of
it. In theory there was nothing he valued more than just such a logical
passion as Madame Carre's, but it was apt in fact, when he found himself
at close quarters with it, to appear an ado about nothing.

If the old woman was hard it was not that many of her present
conclusions about the _jeune Anglaise_ were not indulgent, but that she
had a vision of the great manner, of right and wrong, of the just and
the false, so high and reli