"Well, anything I can help to bring about," said Peter Sherringham, more and more struck with the girl's rich type. Miriam Rooth sat in silence while this discussion went on, looking from one speaker to the other with a strange dependent candour. "Ah, if your part's marked out I congratulate you, mademoiselle!"--and the old actress underlined the words as she had often underlined others on the stage. She smiled with large permissiveness on the young aspirant, who appeared not to understand her. Her tone penetrated, however, to certain depths in the mother's nature, adding another stir to agitated waters. "I feel the responsibility of what she shall find in the life, the standards, of the theatre," Mrs. Rooth explained. "Where is the purest tone--where are the highest standards? That's what I ask," the good lady continued with a misguided intensity which elicited a peal of unceremonious but sociable laughter from Gabriel Nash. "The purest tone--_qu'est-ce que c'est que ca_?" Madame Carre demanded in the finest manner of modern comedy. "We're very, _very_ respectable," Mrs. Rooth went on, but now smiling and achieving lightness too. "What I want is to place my daughter where the conduct--and the picture of conduct in which she should take part--wouldn't be quite absolutely dreadful. Now, _chere madame_, how about all that; how about _conduct_ in the French theatre--all the things she should see, the things she should hear, the things she should learn?" Her hostess took it, as Sherringham felt, _de tres-haut_. "I don't think I know what you're talking about. They're the things she may see and hear and learn everywhere; only they're better done, they're better said, above all they're better taught. The only conduct that concerns an, actress, it seems to me, is her own, and the only way for her to behave herself is not to be a helpless stick. I know no other conduct." "But there are characters, there are situations, which I don't think I should like to see _her_ undertake." "There are many, no doubt, which she would do well to leave alone!" laughed the Frenchwoman. "I shouldn't like to see her represent a very bad woman--a _really_ bad one," Mrs. Rooth serenely pursued. "Ah in England then, and in your theatre, every one's immaculately good? Your plays must be even more ingenious than I supposed!" "We haven't any plays," said Gabriel Nash. "People will write them for Miss Rooth--it will be a new era," Sherringham threw in with wanton, or at least with combative, optimism. "Will _you_, sir--will you do something? A sketch of one of our grand English ideals?" the old lady asked engagingly. "Oh I know what you do with our pieces--to show your superior virtue!" Madame Carre cried before he had time to reply that he wrote nothing but diplomatic memoranda. "Bad women? _Je n'ai joue que ca, madame_. 'Really' bad? I tried to make them real!"