"Well," she declared, "I won't, but I shall wait till I find a husband who's charming enough and bad enough. One who'll beat me and swindle me and spend my money on other women—that's the sort of man for me. Mr. Dormer, delightful as he is, doesn't come up to that."
"You'll marry Basil Dashwood." He spoke it with conviction.
"Oh 'marry'?—call it marry if you like. That's what poor mother threatens me with—she lives in dread of it."
"To this hour," he mentioned, "I haven't managed to make out what your mother wants. She has so many ideas, as Madame Carré said."
"She wants me to be some sort of tremendous creature—all her ideas are reducible to that. What makes the muddle is that she isn't clear about the creature she wants most. A great actress or a great lady—sometimes she inclines for one and sometimes for the other, but on the whole persuading herself that a great actress, if she'll cultivate the right people, may be a great lady. When I tell her that won't do and that a great actress can never be anything but a great vagabond, then the dear old thing has tantrums, and we have scenes—the most grotesque: they'd make the fortune, for a subject, of some play-writing rascal, if he had the wit to guess them; which, luckily for us perhaps, he never will. She usually winds up by protesting—devinez un peu quoi!" Miriam added. And as her companion professed his complete inability to divine: "By declaring that rather than take it that way I must marry you."
"She's shrewder than I thought," Peter returned. "It's the last of vanities to talk about, but I may state in passing that if you'd marry me you should be the greatest of all possible ladies."
She had a beautiful, comical gape. "Lord o' mercy, my dear fellow, what natural capacity have I for that?"
"You're artist enough for anything. I shall be a great diplomatist: my resolution's firmly taken, I'm infinitely cleverer than you have the least idea of, and you shall be," he went on, "a great diplomatist's wife."
"And the demon, the devil, the devourer and destroyer, that you are so fond of talking about: what, in such a position, do you do with that element of my nature? Où le fourrez-vous?" she cried as with a real anxiety.
"I'll look after it, I'll keep it under. Rather perhaps I should say I'll bribe it and amuse it; I'll gorge it with earthly grandeurs."