Certainly, however, she seemed to belong to him very much indeed, as she sat facing him in the Paris café, in her youth, her beauty and her talkative confidence. Sherringham had done nothing for her as yet, given no substantial pledge of interest yet she was already talking as if his protection were assured and jealous. She was in earnest, evidently prepared to work, but her imagination flew over preliminaries and probations, took no account of the steps in the process, especially the first tiresome ones, the test of patience. She won’t want to let you have me.” She said things of that kind, astounding in selfcomplacency, the assumption of quick success. “ I know what it will come to: Madame Carré will want to keep me.” This was one of the announcements she presently made. So Miriam discoursed, familiarly, disconnectedly, as the pair went their way down the Rue de Constantinople and she continued to abound in anecdote and remark after they were seated, face to face, at a little marble table in an establishment which Sherringham selected carefully, and he had caused her, at her request, to be accommodated with sirop d’orgeat. I ’ll tell you what it is some day I ’ll do it for you. Oh, I’ve observed scenes, between men and women - very quiet, terribly quiet, but tragic ! Once I saw a woman do something that I 'm going to do some day, when I 'm great - if I can get the situation. There’s a great deal goes on in cafés people come to them to talk things over, their private affairs, their complications they have important meetings. I will go anywhere you like you need n’t be afraid, we have been in places ! I have learned a great deal that way sitting beside mamma and watching people, their faces, their types, their movements. I played in them I was only fifteen years old, but I was very big, and I thought I was in heaven. We did stay in a place once where there was a deer-park, and also private theatricals. Mamma has delightful phrases: ' My family is almost extinct.’ Then your family may have been anything you like. It’s very convenient when your cousins are dead, because that explains everything. You should hear mamma on the subject of our visits in England. Some of them are dead the others don’t ask us any more. I have never been very clear about our cousins, and I don’t think they were at all clear about us. There were people in England who used to ask us to stay some of them were our cousins - or mamma says they were. If you 're going to be an actress, you must get used to being looked at. As for me, I dare say I might be anything. However, we have never been spoken to : any one can see mamma ’s a lady. I don’t know what the people take me for. I sit there beside her, with nothing to do, not even a stocking to mend she does n’t think that’s comme il faut. That’s very well for her, but it does n’t feed me. She takes them to the cafés - the little cheap, shabby cafés, too - and she reads there all the evening. She knows every cabinet de lecture in every town the little cheap, shabby ones, I mean, in the back streets, where they have odd volumes and only ask a sou, and the books are so old that they smell bad. When she had nothing to eat she began a novel in ten volumes - the old-fashioned ones they lasted longest. But it made no difference mamma was always up to her ears in books. It’s only fivepence a year, but it has been settled it comes regularly it used to come only when we had written and begged and waited. Something has been done in England I don’t understand what. You need n’t be afraid - she won’t borrow from you. Mamma used to borrow, but people would n’t always lend. That is n’t amusing when you 're away, in a foreign town, without any friends. There was n’t any to come there was n’t any to get home. Once it did n’t come for months - for months and months. Mamma’s money is sent out from England, and sometimes it did n’t come. We have lived in places we could n’t sit in, if you want to know - where there was only really room if we were in bed. Mamma and I have sat in them for hours, many a time, with a consommation of three sous, to save fire and candles at home. “ They are warm in winter, and they are full of gaslight. “Objection? I have spent my life in cafés ! ” she exclaimed. WHEN she had descended into the street with Sherringham, Miriam informed him that she was thirsty, dying to drink something: upon which he asked her if she would have any objection to going with him to a café.
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