ut it, as a part of the
attraction exerted by this young lady was that she caused him to have
his wonder about everything she did. Was it in fact a conscious show, a
line taken for effect, so that at the Comedie her own display should be
the most successful of all? That question danced attendance on the
liberal intercourse of these young people and fortunately as yet did
little to embitter Sherringham's share of it. His general sense that she
was personating had its especial moments of suspense and perplexity, and
added variety and even occasionally a degree of excitement to their
commerce. At the theatre, for the most part, she was really flushed with
eagerness; and with the spectators who turned an admiring eye into the
dim compartment of which she pervaded the front she might have passed
for a romantic or at least an insatiable young woman from the country.

Mrs. Rooth took a more general view, but attended immensely to the
story, in respect to which she manifested a patient good faith which had
its surprises and its comicalities for her daughter's patron. She found
no play too tedious, no _entr'acte_ too long, no _baignoire_ too hot, no
tissue of incidents too complicated, no situation too unnatural and no
sentiments too sublime. She gave him the measure of her power to sit and
sit--an accomplishment to which she owed in the struggle for existence
such superiority as she might be said to have achieved. She could
out-sit everybody and everything; looking as if she had acquired the
practice in repeated years of small frugality combined with large
leisure--periods when she had nothing but hours and days and years to
spend and had learned to calculate in any situation how long she could
stay. "Staying" was so often a saving--a saving of candles, of fire and
even (as it sometimes implied a scheme for stray refection) of food.
Peter saw soon enough how bravely her shreds and patches of gentility
and equanimity hung together, with the aid of whatever casual pins and
other makeshifts, and if he had been addicted to studying the human
mixture in its different combinations would have found in her an
interesting compendium of some of the infatuations that survive a hard
discipline. He made indeed without difficulty the reflexion that her
life might have taught her something of the real, at the same time that
he could scarce help thinking it clever of her to have so persistently
declined the lesson. She appeared to have put it b