earnest, evidently prepared to work, but her
imagination flew over preliminaries and probations, took no account of
the steps in the process, especially the first tiresome ones, the hard
test of honesty. He had done nothing for her as yet, given no
substantial pledge of interest; yet she was already talking as if his
protection were assured and jealous. Certainly, however, she seemed to
belong to him very much indeed as she sat facing him at the Paris cafe
in her youth, her beauty, and her talkative confidence. This degree of
possession was highly agreeable to him and he asked nothing more than to
make it last and go further. The impulse to draw her out was
irresistible, to encourage her to show herself all the way; for if he
was really destined to take her career in hand he counted on some good
equivalent--such for instance as that she should at least amuse him.

"It's very singular; I know nothing like it," he said--"your equal
mastery of two languages."

"Say of half-a-dozen," Miriam smiled.

"Oh I don't believe in the others to the same degree. I don't imagine
that, with all deference to your undeniable facility, you'd be judged
fit to address a German or an Italian audience in their own tongue. But
you might a French, perfectly, and they're the most particular of all;
for their idiom's supersensitive and they're incapable of enduring the
_baragouinage_ of foreigners, to which we listen with such complacency.
In fact your French is better than your English--it's more conventional;
there are little queernesses and impurities in your English, as if you
had lived abroad too much. Ah you must work that."

"I'll work it with _you_. I like the way you speak."

"You must speak beautifully; you must do something for the standard."

"For the standard?"

"Well, there isn't any after all." Peter had a drop. "It has gone to the
dogs."

"Oh I'll bring it back. I know what you mean."

"No one knows, no one cares; the sense is gone--it isn't in the public,"
he continued, ventilating a grievance he was rarely able to forget, the
vision of which now suddenly made a mission full of possible sanctity
for his companion. "Purity of speech, on our stage, doesn't exist. Every
one speaks as he likes and audiences never notice; it's the last thing
they think of. The place is given up to abominable dialects and
individual tricks, any vulgarity flourishes, and on top of it all the
Americans, with every conceivable crudity, come in