Miriam quickly declaimed. "Ah if you don't feel the way she makes a throne of it!" "It's really tremendously fine, _chere madame_," Sherringham said. "There's nothing like it." "_Vous etes insupportables_," the old woman answered. "Stay with us. I'll teach you Phedre." "Ah Phaedra, Phaedra!" Basil Dashwood vaguely ejaculated, looking more gentlemanly than ever. "You've learned all I've taught you, but where the devil have you learned what I haven't?" Madame Carre went on. "I've worked--I have; you'd call it work--all through the bright, late summer, all through the hot, dull, empty days. I've battered down the door--I did hear it crash one day. But I'm not so very good yet. I'm only in the right direction." "_Malicieuse_!" growled Madame Carre. "Oh I can beat that," the girl went on. "Did you wake up one morning and find you had grown a pair of wings?" Peter asked. "Because that's what the difference amounts to--you really soar. Moreover, you're an angel," he added, charmed with her unexpectedness, the good nature of her forbearance to reproach him for not having written to her. And it seemed to him privately that she _was_ angelic when in answer to this she said ever so blandly: "You know you read _King John_ with me before you went away. I thought over immensely what you said. I didn't understand it much at the time--I was so stupid. But it all came to me later." "I wish you could see yourself," Peter returned. "My dear fellow, I do. What sort of a dunce do you take me for? I didn't miss a vibration of my voice, a fold of my robe." "Well, I didn't see you troubling about it," Peter handsomely insisted. "No one ever will. Do you think I'd ever show it?" "_Ars celare artem_," Basil Dashwood jocosely dropped. "You must first have the art to hide," said Sherringham, wondering a little why Miriam didn't introduce her young friend to him. She was, however, both then and later perfectly neglectful of such cares, never thinking, never minding how other people got on together. When she found they didn't get on she jeered at them: that was the nearest she came to arranging for them. Our young man noted in her from the moment she felt her strength an immense increase of this good-humoured inattention to detail--all detail save that of her work, to which she was ready to sacrifice holocausts of feelings when the feelings were other people's. This conferred on her a large profanity, an absence of ceremony as to her social relations, which was both amusing because it suggested that she would take what she gave, and formidable because it was inconvenient and you mightn't care to give what she would take. "If you haven't any art it's not quite the same as if you didn't hide it, is it?" Basil Dashwood ingeniously threw out. "That's right--say one of your clever things!" Miriam sweetly responded.