"I don't then. Didn't I tell you just now that you were extraordinary? That's the term, moreover, that you applied to yourself when you came to see me—when you said a girl had to be a kind of monster to wish to go on the stage. It remains the right term and your simplicity doesn't mitigate it. What's rare in you is that you have—as I suspect at least—no nature of your own." Miriam listened to this as if preparing to argue with it or not, only as it should strike her as a sufficiently brave picture; but as yet, naturally, she failed to understand. "You're always at concert pitch or on your horse; there are no intervals. It's the absence of intervals, of a fond or background, that I don't comprehend. You're an embroidery without a canvas."
"Yes—perhaps," the girl replied, her head on one side as if she were looking at the pattern of this rarity. "But I'm very honest."
"You can't be everything, both a consummate actress and a flower of the field. You've got to choose."
She looked at him a moment. "I'm glad you think I'm so wonderful."
"Your feigning may be honest in the sense that your only feeling is your feigned one," Peter pursued. "That's what I mean by the absence of a ground or of intervals. It's a kind of thing that's a labyrinth!"
"I know what I am," she said sententiously.
But her companion continued, following his own train. "Were you really so frightened the first day you went to Madame Carré's?"
She stared, then with a flush threw back her head. "Do you think I was pretending?"
"I think you always are. However, your vanity—if you had any!—would be natural."
"I've plenty of that. I'm not a bit ashamed to own it."