"Please don't go back for the rest of the play. Stay here." They now had the foyer virtually to themselves.
"I want to stay here. I like it better," She moved back to the chimney-piece, from above which the cold portrait of Rachel looked down, and as he accompanied her he went on:
"No, no; to you. Give it up and live with _me."_
"Give it up?" She turned her stage face on him.
"Give it up and I'll marry you to-morrow."
"This is a happy time to ask it!" she said with superior amusement. "And this is a good place!"
"Very good indeed, and that's why I speak: it's a place to make one choose--it puts it all before one."
"To make _you_ choose, you mean. I'm much obliged, but that's not my choice," laughed Miriam.
"You shall be anything you like except this."
"Except what I most want to be? I _am_ much obliged."
"Don't you care for me? Haven't you any gratitude?" Sherringham insisted.
"Gratitude for kindly removing the blest cup from my lips? I want to be what _she_ is--I want it more than ever."
"Ah what she is--!" He took it impatiently.
"Do you mean I can't? Well see if I can't. Tell me more about her--tell me everything."
"Haven't you seen for yourself and, knowing things as you do, can't you judge?"
"She's strange, she's mysterious," Miriam allowed, looking at the fire. "She showed us nothing--nothing of her real self."
"So much the better, all things considered."
"Are there all sorts of other things in her life? That's what I believe," the girl went on, raising her eyes to him.
"I can't tell you what there is in the life of such a woman."
"Imagine--when she's so perfect!" she exclaimed thoughtfully. "Ah she kept me off--she kept me off! Her charming manner is in itself a kind of contempt. It's an abyss--it's the wall of China. She has a hard polish, an inimitable surface, like some wonderful porcelain that costs more than you'd think."
"Do you want to become like that?" Sherringham asked.
"If I could I should be enchanted. One can always try."
"You must act better than she," he went on.
"Better? I thought you wanted me to give it up."
"Ah I don't know what I want," he cried, "and you torment me and turn me inside out! What I want is you yourself."
"Oh don't worry," said Miriam--now all kindly. Then she added that Mademoiselle Voisin had invited her to "call"; to which Sherringham replied with a certain dryness that she would probably not find that necessary. This made the girl stare and she asked: "Do you mean it won't do on account of mamma's prejudices?"