"I'm poor myself. That is, I'm very far from rich. But why receive favours--?" And here he in turn checked himself with the sense that he was indeed taking a great deal on his back if he pretended already--he had not seen the pair three times--to regulate their intercourse with the rest of the world. But the girl instantly carried out his thought and more than his thought.
"Favours from Mr. Nash? Oh he doesn't count!"
The way she dropped these words--they would have been admirable on the stage--made him reply with prompt ease: "What I meant just now was that you're not to tell him, after all my swagger, that I consider that you and I are really required to save our theatre."
"Oh if we can save it he shall know it!" She added that she must positively get home; her mother would be in a state: she had really scarce ever been out alone. He mightn't think it, but so it was. Her mother's ideas, those awfully proper ones, were not all talk. She _did_ keep her! Sherringham accepted this--he had an adequate and indeed an analytic vision of Mrs. Rooth's conservatism; but he observed at the same time that his companion made no motion to rise. He made none either; he only said:
"We're very frivolous, the way we chatter. What you want to do to get your foot in the stirrup is supremely difficult. There's everything to overcome. You've neither an engagement nor the prospect of an engagement."
"Oh you'll get me one!" Her manner presented this as so certain that it wasn't worth dilating on; so instead of dilating she inquired abruptly a second time: "Why do you think I'm so simple?"
"I don't then. Didn't I tell you just now that you were extraordinary? That's the term, moreover, that you applied to yourself when you came to see me--when you said a girl had to be a kind of monster to wish to go on the stage. It remains the right term and your simplicity doesn't mitigate it. What's rare in you is that you have--as I suspect at least--no nature of your own." Miriam listened to this as if preparing to argue with it or not, only as it should strike her as a sufficiently brave picture; but as yet, naturally, she failed to understand. "You're always at concert pitch or on your horse; there are no intervals. It's the absence of intervals, of a _fond_ or background, that I don't comprehend. You're an embroidery without a canvas."