"Tiens! you gentlemen meet here for the first time? You do right to become friends—that's the best thing. Live together in peace and mutual confidence. C'est de beaucoup le plus sage."
"Certainly, for yoke-fellows," said Sherringham.
He began the next moment to repeat to his new acquaintance some of the things he had been told in London; but their hostess stopped him off, waving the talk away with charming overdone stage horror and the young hands of the heroines of Marivaux. "Ah wait till you go—for that! Do you suppose I care for news of your mountebanks' booths?"
[XX]
As many people know, there are not, in the famous Théâtre Français, more than a dozen good seats accessible to ladies.[*] The stalls are forbidden them, the boxes are a quarter of a mile from the stage and the balcony is a delusion save for a few chairs at either end of its vast horseshoe. But there are two excellent baignoires d'avant-scène, which indeed are by no means always to be had. It was, however, into one of them that, immediately after his return to Paris, Sherringham ushered Mrs. Rooth and her daughter, with the further escort of Basil Dashwood. He had chosen the evening of the reappearance of the celebrated Mademoiselle Voisin—she had been enjoying a congé of three months—an actress whom Miriam had seen several times before and for whose method she professed a high though somewhat critical esteem. It was only for the return of this charming performer that Peter had been waiting to respond to Miriam's most ardent wish—that of spending an hour in the foyer des artistes of the great theatre. She was the person whom he knew best in the house of Molière; he could count on her to do them the honours some night when she was in the "bill," and to make the occasion sociable. Miriam had been impatient for it—she was so convinced that her eyes would be opened in the holy of holies; but wishing as particularly as he did to participate in her impression he had made her promise she wouldn't taste of this experience without him—not let Madame Carré, for instance, take her in his absence. There were questions the girl wished to put to Mademoiselle Voisin—questions which, having admired her from the balcony, she felt she was exactly the person to answer. She was more "in it" now, after all, than Madame Carré, in spite of her slenderer talent: she was younger, fresher, more modern and—Miriam found the word—less academic. She was in fine less "vieux jeu." Peter perfectly foresaw the day when his young friend would make indulgent allowances for poor Madame Carré, patronising her as an old woman of good intentions.
[*: 1890]
The play to-night was six months old, a large, serious, successful comedy by the most distinguished of authors, with a thesis, a chorus embodied in one character, a scène à faire and a part full of opportunities for Mademoiselle Voisin. There were things to be said about this artist, strictures to be dropped as to the general quality of her art, and Miriam leaned back now, making her comments as if they cost her less, but the actress had knowledge and distinction and pathos, and our young lady repeated several times: "How quiet she is, how wonderfully quiet! Scarcely anything moves but her face and her voice. Le geste rare, but really expressive when it comes. I like that economy; it's the only way to make the gesture significant."
"I don't admire the way she holds her arms," Basil Dash wood said: "like a demoiselle de magasin trying on a jacket."
"Well, she holds them at any rate. I daresay it's more than you do with yours."