"You're a Jewess—I'm sure of that," he went on.
She jumped at this, as he was destined to see later she would ever jump at anything that might make her more interesting or striking; even at things that grotesquely contradicted or excluded each other. "That's always possible if one's clever. I'm very willing, because I want to be the English Rachel."
"Then you must leave Madame Carré as soon as you've got from her what she can give."
"Oh, you needn't fear; you shan't lose me," the girl replied with charming gross fatuity. "My name's Jewish," she went on, "but it was that of my grandmother, my father's mother. She was a baroness in Germany. That is, she was the daughter of a baron."
Peter accepted this statement with reservations, but he replied: "Put all that together and it makes you very sufficiently of Rachel's tribe."
"I don't care if I'm of her tribe artistically. I'm of the family of the artists—je me fiche of any other! I'm in the same style as that woman—I know it."
"You speak as if you had seen her," he said, amused at the way she talked of "that woman." "Oh I know all about her—I know all about all the great actors. But that won't prevent me from speaking divine English."
"You must learn lots of verse; you must repeat it to me," Sherringham went on. "You must break yourself in till you can say anything. You must learn passages of Milton, passages of Wordsworth."
"Did they write plays?"
"Oh it isn't only a matter of plays! You can't speak a part properly till you can speak everything else, anything that comes up, especially in proportion as it's difficult. That gives you authority."