r. I'm very willing, because I want to be
the English Rachel."

"Then you must leave Madame Carre as soon as you've got from her what
she can give."

"Oh, you needn't fear; you shan't lose me," the girl replied with
charming gross fatuity. "My name's Jewish," she went on, "but it was
that of my grandmother, my father's mother. She was a baroness in
Germany. That is, she was the daughter of a baron."

Peter accepted this statement with reservations, but he replied: "Put
all that together and it makes you very sufficiently of Rachel's tribe."

"I don't care if I'm of her tribe artistically. I'm of the family of the
artists--_je me fiche_ of any other! I'm in the same style as that
woman--I know it."

"You speak as if you had seen her," he said, amused at the way she
talked of "that woman." "Oh I know all about her--I know all about all
the great actors. But that won't prevent me from speaking divine
English."

"You must learn lots of verse; you must repeat it to me," Sherringham
went on. "You must break yourself in till you can say anything. You must
learn passages of Milton, passages of Wordsworth."

"Did _they_ write plays?"

"Oh it isn't only a matter of plays! You can't speak a part properly
till you can speak everything else, anything that comes up, especially
in proportion as it's difficult. That gives you authority."

"Oh yes, I'm going in for authority. There's more chance in English,"
the girl added in the next breath. "There are not so many others--the
terrible competition. There are so many here--not that I'm afraid," she
chattered on. "But we've got America and they haven't. America's a great
place."

"You talk like a theatrical agent. They're lucky not to have it as we
have it. Some of them do go, and it ruins them."

"Why, it fills their pockets!" Miriam cried.

"Yes, but see what they pay. It's the death of an actor to play to big
populations that don't understand his language. It's nothing then but
the _gros moyens_; all his delicacy perishes. However, they'll
understand _you_."

"Perhaps I shall be too affected," she said.

"You won't be more so than Garrick or Mrs. Siddons or John Kemble or
Edmund Kean. They understood Edmund Kean. All reflexion is affectation,
and all acting's reflexion."

"I don't know--mine's instinct," Miriam contended.

"My dear young lady, you talk of 'yours'; but don't be offended if I
tell you that yours doesn't exist. Some day it will--if the thing comes
of