His apparent oblivion of her incoherence gave full freedom to her delight in her collection of idioms and proverbs. Each one flung out with its appropriate emphasis and the right foreign intonation gave her a momentary change of personality. He caught the shreds and returned them woven into phrases increasing her store of convincing foreignness, comfortably, from the innocence of his polyglot experience, requiring no instructive contribution from her, reassuringly assuming her equal knowledge, his conscious response being only to her joyousness, his eyes wide ahead, his features moulded to gaiety. The burden of her personal dinginess and resourcelessness in a strong resourceful world was hidden by him because he was not aware of dinginess and resourcelessness anywhere. Dingy and resourceless she wandered along keeping as long as her scraps of convincing impersonation should hold out, to her equal companionship with his varied experience; bearing within her in secret unfathomable abundance the gift of ideal old-English rose and white gracious adorable womanhood given her by Dr. Heber. At the turning into Oxford Street they lost each other. Miriam wandered in solitude amidst jostling bodies. The exhausted air rang with lifeless strident voices in shoutings and heavy thick flattened unconcerned speech; even from above a weight seemed to press. Clearer space lay ahead; but it was the clear space of Oxford Street and pressed upon her without ray or break. Once it had seemed part of the golden west-end; but Oxford Street was not the west-end. It was more lifeless and hopeless than even the north of London; more endurable because life was near at hand. Oxford Street was like a prison ... the embarrassment of her enterprise came upon her suddenly; the gay going off was at an end; perhaps she might get away and back home alone up a side street. Amidst the shouting of women and the interwoven dark thick growlings of conversations she heard Mr. Mendizabal's ironic snorting laugh not far behind her. Glancing round from the free space of darkness she had reached she saw him emerge shouldering from a group of women, short and square and upright and gleaming brilliantly with the remains of his laughter. A furious wrath flickered over her. He came forward with his eyes ahead unseeing, nearer, near, safe at her side, _her_ little foreign Mr. Mendizabal, mild and homely.