ontained nothing but ghostly sounds.
They found at any rate a long luncheon, and in the landscape the very
spirit of silvery summer and of the French pictorial brush.

I have said that in these days Sherringham wondered about many things,
and by the time his leave of absence came this practice had produced a
particular speculation. He was surprised that he shouldn't be in love
with Miriam Rooth and considered at moments of leisure the causes of his
exemption. He had felt from the first that she was a "nature," and each
time she met his eyes it seemed to come to him straighter that her
beauty was rare. You had to get the good view of her face, but when
you did so it was a splendid mobile mask. And the wearer of this
high ornament had frankness and courage and variety--no end of the
unusual and the unexpected. She had qualities that seldom went
together--impulses and shynesses, audacities and lapses, something
coarse, popular, and strong all intermingled with disdains and languors
and nerves. And then above all she was _there_, was accessible, almost
belonged to him. He reflected ingeniously that he owed his escape to a
peculiar cause--to the fact that they had together a positive outside
object. Objective, as it were, was all their communion; not personal and
selfish, but a matter of art and business and discussion. Discussion had
saved him and would save him further, for they would always have
something to quarrel about. Sherringham, who was not a diplomatist for
nothing, who had his reasons for steering straight and wished neither to
deprive the British public of a rising star nor to exchange his actual
situation for that of a yoked _impresario_, blessed the beneficence, the
salubrity, the pure exorcism of art. At the same time, rather
inconsistently and feeling that he had a completer vision than before of
that oddest of animals the artist who happens to have been born a woman,
he felt warned against a serious connexion--he made a great point of the
"serious"--with so slippery and ticklish a creature. The two ladies had
only to stay in Paris, save their candle-ends and, as Madame Carre had
enjoined, practise their scales: there were apparently no autumn visits
to English country-houses in prospect for Mrs. Rooth. Peter parted with
them on the understanding that in London he would look as thoroughly as
possible into the question of an engagement. The day before he began his
holiday he went to see Madame Carre, who said