"Difficulties are a mild name for them; poison even is a mild name for the ill he suffers from. The principal difficulty is that he doesn't know what the devil he wants. The next is that I don't either—or what the devil I want myself. I only know what I don't want," Miriam kept on brightly and as if uttering some happy, beneficent truth. "I don't want a person who takes things even less simply than I do myself. Mr. Sherringham, poor man, must be very uncomfortable, for one side of him's in a perpetual row with the other side. He's trying to serve God and Mammon, and I don't know how God will come off. What I like in you is that you've definitely let Mammon go—it's the only decent way. That's my earnest conviction, and yet they call us people light. Dear Mr. Sherringham has tremendous ambitions—tremendous riguardi, as we used to say in Italy. He wants to enjoy every comfort and to save every appearance, and all without making a scrap of a sacrifice. He expects others—me, for instance—to make all the sacrifices. Merci, much as I esteem him and much as I owe him! I don't know how he ever came to stray at all into our bold, bad, downright Bohemia: it was a cruel trick for fortune to play him. He can't keep out of it, he's perpetually making dashes across the border, and yet as soon as he gets here he's on pins and needles. There's another in whose position—if I were in it—I wouldn't look at the likes of us!"
"I don't know much about the matter," Nick brought out after some intent smudging, "but I've an idea Peter thinks he has made or at least is making sacrifices."
"So much the better—you must encourage him, you must help him."
"I don't know what my daughter's talking about," Mrs. Rooth contributed—"she's much too paradoxical for my plain mind. But there's one way to encourage Mr. Sherringham—there's one way to help him; and perhaps it won't be a worse way for a gentleman of your good nature that it will help me at the same time. Can't I look to you, dear Mr. Dormer, to see that he does come to the theatre to-night—that he doesn't feel himself obliged to stay away?"
"What danger is there of his staying away?" Nick asked.
"If he's bent on sacrifices that's a very good one to begin with," Miriam observed.
"That's the mad, bad way she talks to him—she has forbidden the dear unhappy gentleman the house!" her mother cried. "She brought it up to him just now at the door—before Miss Dormer: such very odd form! She pretends to impose her commands upon him."
"Oh he'll be there—we're going to dine together," said Nick. And when Miriam asked him what that had to do with it he went on: "Why we've arranged it; I'm going, and he won't let me go alone."
"You're going? I sent you no places," his sitter objected.
"Yes, but I've got one. Why didn't you, after all I've done for you?"