"You're always acting," he declared in English and with a simple-minded laugh, while Sherringham remained struck with his expressing just what he himself had felt weeks before. "And when you've shown them your fish-wife, to your public _de la-bas_, what will you do next?" asked Madame Carre. "I'll do Juliet--I'll do Cleopatra." "Rather a big bill, isn't it?" Mr. Dashwood volunteered to Sherringham in a friendly but discriminating manner. "Constance and Juliet--take care you don't mix them," said Sherringham. "I want to be various. You once told me I had a hundred characters," Miriam returned. "Ah, _vous en etes la_?" cried the old actress. "You may have a hundred characters, but you've only three plays. I'm told that's all there are in English." Miriam, admirably indifferent to this charge, appealed to Peter. "What arrangements have you made? What do the people want?" "The people at the theatre?" "I'm afraid they don't want _King John_, and I don't believe they hunger for _Antony and Cleopatra_," Basil Dashwood suggested. "Ships and sieges and armies and pyramids, you know: we mustn't be too heavy." "Oh I hate scenery!" the girl sighed. "_Elle est superbe_," said Madame Carre. "You must put those pieces on the stage: how will you do it?" "Oh we know how to get up a play in London, Madame Carre"--Mr. Dashwood was all geniality. "They put money on it, you know." "On it? But what do they put _in_ it? Who'll interpret them? Who'll manage a style like that--the style of which the rhapsodies she has just repeated are a specimen? Whom have you got that one has ever heard of?" "Oh you'll hear of a good deal when once she gets started," Dashwood cheerfully contended. Madame Carre looked at him a moment; then, "I feel that you'll become very bad," she said to Miriam. "I'm glad I shan't see it." "People will do things for me--I'll make them," the girl declared. "I'll stir them up so that they'll have ideas." "What people, pray?" "Ah terrible woman!" Peter theatrically groaned. "We translate your pieces--there will be plenty of parts," Basil Dashwood said. "Why then go out of the door to come in at the window?--especially if you smash it! An English arrangement of a French piece is a pretty woman with her back turned." "Do you really want to keep her?" Sherringham asked of Madame Carre--quite as if thinking for a moment that this after all might be possible. She bent her strange eyes on him. "No, you're all too queer together. We couldn't be bothered with you and you're not worth it." "I'm glad it's 'together' that we're queer then--we can console each other."