It was as if Madame Carre, in pursuance of her inflamed sense that the art was everything and the individual nothing save as he happened to serve it, had said: "Well, if she _will_ have it she shall; she shall know what she's in for, what I went through, battered and broken in as we all have been--all who are worthy, who have had the honour. She shall know the real point of view." It was as if she were still beset with Mrs. Rooth's twaddle and muddle, her hypocrisy, her idiotic scruples--something she felt all need to belabour, to trample on. Miriam took it all as a bath, a baptism, with shuddering joy and gleeful splashes; staring, wondering, sometimes blushing and failing to follow, but not shrinking nor wounded; laughing, when convicted, at her own expense and feeling evidently that this at last was the high cold air of art, an initiation, a discipline that nothing could undo. Sherringham said he would see her home--he wanted to talk to her and she must walk away with him. "And it's understood then she may come back," he added to Madame Carre. "It's _my_ affair of course. You'll take an interest in her for a month or two; she'll sit at your feet." The old actress had an admirable shrug. "Oh I'll knock her about--she seems stout enough!" XI When they had descended to the street Miriam mentioned to Peter that she was thirsty, dying to drink something: upon which he asked her if she should have an objection to going with him to a cafe. "Objection? I've spent my life in cafes! They're warm in winter and you get your lamplight for nothing," she explained. "Mamma and I have sat in them for hours, many a time, with a _consommation_ of three sous, to save fire and candles at home. We've lived in places we couldn't sit in, if you want to know--where there was only really room if we were in bed. Mamma's money's sent out from England and sometimes it usedn't to come. Once it didn't come for months--for months and months. I don't know how we lived. There wasn't any to come; there wasn't any to get home. That isn't amusing when you're away in a foreign town without any friends. Mamma used to borrow, but people wouldn't always lend. You needn't be afraid--she won't borrow of _you_. We're rather better now--something has been done in England; I don't understand what. It's only fivepence a year, but it has been settled; it comes regularly; it used to come only when we had written and begged and waited. But it made no difference--mamma was always up to her ears in books. They served her for food and drink. When she had nothing to eat she began a novel in ten volumes--the old-fashioned ones; they lasted longest. She knows every _cabinet de lecture_ in every town; the little, cheap, shabby ones, I mean, in the back streets, where they have odd volumes and only ask a sou and the books are so old that they smell like close rooms. She takes them to the cafes--the little, cheap, shabby cafes too--and she reads there all the evening.