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The Tragic Muse

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #20085 · 1,208,838 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Tragic Muse

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: December 10, 2006 [eBook #20085]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20085

Credits: E-text prepared by Chuck Greif, R. Cedron, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team Europe


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E-text prepared by Chuck Greif, R. Cedron, and the Project Gutenberg
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THE TRAGIC MUSE

by

HENRY JAMES







MacMillan and Co., Limited St. Martin's Street, London

1921





PREFACE


I profess a certain vagueness of remembrance in respect to the origin
and growth of _The Tragic Muse_, which appeared in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ again, beginning January 1889 and running on, inordinately,
several months beyond its proper twelve. If it be ever of interest and
profit to put one's finger on the productive germ of a work of art, and
if in fact a lucid account of any such work involves that prime
identification, I can but look on the present fiction as a poor
fatherless and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged
birth. I fail to recover my precious first moment of consciousness of
the idea to which it was to give form; to recognise in it--as I like to
do in general--the effect of some particular sharp impression or
concussion. I call such remembered glimmers always precious, because
without them comes no clear vision of what one may have intended, and
without that vision no straight measure of what one may have succeeded
in doing. What I make out from furthest back is that I must have had
from still further back, must in fact practically have always had, the
happy thought of some dramatic picture of the "artist-life" and of the
difficult terms on which it is at the best secured and enjoyed, the
general question of its having to be not altogether easily paid for. To
"do something about art"--art, that is, as a human complication and a
social stumbling-block--must have been for me early a good deal of a
nursed intention, the conflict between art and "the world" striking me
thus betimes as one of the half-dozen great primary motives. I remember
even having taken for granted with this fond inveteracy that no one of
these pregnant themes was likely to prove under the test more full of
matter. This being the case, meanwhile, what would all experience have
done but enrich one's conviction?--since if, on the one hand, I had
gained a more and more intimate view of the nature of art and the
conditions therewith imposed, so the world was a conception that clearly
required, and that would for ever continue to take, any amount of
filling-in. The happy and fruitful truth, at all events, was that there
was opposition--why there _should_ be was another matter--and that the
opposition would beget an infinity of situations. What had doubtless
occurred in fact, moreover, was that just this question of the essence
and the reasons of the opposition had shown itself to demand the light
of experience; so that to the growth of experience, truly, the treatment
of the subject had yielded. It had waited for that advantage.

Yet I continue to see experience giving me its jog mainly in the form of
an invitation from the gentle editor of the _Atlantic_, the late Thomas
Bailey Aldrich, to contribute to his pages a serial that should run
through the year. That friendly appeal becomes thus the most definite
statement I can make of the "genesis" of the book; though from the
moment of its reaching me everything else in the matter seems to live
again. What lives not least, to be quite candid, is the fact that I was
to see this production make a virtual end, for the time, as by its
sinister effect--though for reasons still obscure to me--of the pleasant
old custom of the "running" of the novel. Not for many years was I to
feel the practice, for my benefit, confidingly revive. The influence of
_The Tragic Muse_ was thus exactly other than what I had all earnestly
(if of course privately enough) invoked for it, and I remember well the
particular chill, at last, of the sense of my having launched it in a
great grey void from which no echo or message whatever would come back.
None, in the event, ever came, and as I now read the book over I find
the circumstance make, in its name, for a special tenderness of charity;
even for that finer consideration hanging in the parental breast about
the maimed or slighted, the disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or
unlikely child--with this hapless small mortal thought of further as
somehow "compromising." I am thus able to take the thing as having quite
wittingly and undisturbedly existed for itself alone, and to liken it to
some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been
loosed; or, better still, to some jar of potpourri, shaped and
overfigured and polished, but of which the lid, never lifted, has
provided for the intense accumulation of the fragrance within. The
consistent, the sustained, preserved _tone_ of _The Tragic Muse_, its
constant and doubtless rather fine-drawn truth to its particular sought
pitch and accent, are, critically speaking, its principal merit--the
inner harmony that I perhaps presumptuously permit myself to compare to
an unevaporated scent.

After which indeed I may well be summoned to say what I mean, in such a
business, by an appreciable "tone" and how I can justify my claim to
it--a demonstration that will await us later. Suffice it just here that
I find the latent historic clue in my hand again with the easy recall of
my prompt grasp of such a chance to make a story about art. _There_ was
my subject this time--all mature with having long waited, and with the
blest dignity that my original perception of its value was quite lost in
the mists of youth. I must long have carried in my head the notion of a
young man who should amid difficulty--the difficulties being the
story--have abandoned "public life" for the zealous pursuit of some
supposedly minor craft; just as, evidently, there had hovered before me
some possible picture (but all comic and ironic) of one of the most
salient London "social" passions, the unappeasable curiosity for the
things of the theatre; for every one of them, that is, except the drama
itself, and for the "personality" of the performer (almost any performer
quite sufficiently serving) in particular. This latter, verily, had
struck me as an aspect appealing mainly to satiric treatment; the only
adequate or effective treatment, I had again and again felt, for most of
the distinctively social aspects of London: the general artlessly
histrionised air of things caused so many examples to spring from behind
any hedge. What came up, however, at once, for my own stretched canvas,
was that it would have to be ample, give me really space to turn round,
and that a single illustrative case might easily be meagre fare. The
young man who should "chuck" admired politics, and of course some other
admired object with them, would be all very well; but he wouldn't be
enough--therefore what should one say to some other young man who would
chuck something and somebody else, admired in their way too?

There need never, at the worst, be any difficulty about the things
advantageously chuckable for art; the question is all but of choosing
them in the heap. Yet were I to represent a struggle--an interesting
one, indispensably--with the passions of the theatre (as a profession,
or at least as an absorption) I should have to place the theatre in
another light than the satiric. This, however, would by good luck be
perfectly possible too--without a sacrifice of truth; and I should
doubtless even be able to make my theatric case as important as I might
desire it. It seemed clear that I needed big cases--small ones would
practically give my central idea away; and I make out now my still
labouring under the illusion that the case of the sacrifice for art
_can_ ever be, with truth, with taste, with discretion involved,
apparently and showily "big." I daresay it glimmered upon me even then
that the very sharpest difficulty of the victim of the conflict I should
seek to represent, and the very highest interest of his predicament,
dwell deep in the fact that his repudiation of the great obvious, great
moral or functional or useful character, shall just have to consent to
resemble a surrender for absolutely nothing. Those characters are all
large and expansive, seated and established and endowed; whereas the
most charming truth about the preference for art is that to parade
abroad so thoroughly inward and so naturally embarrassed a matter is to
falsify and vulgarise it; that as a preference attended with the honours
of publicity it is indeed nowhere; that in fact, under the rule of its
sincerity, its only honours are those of contradiction, concentration
and a seemingly deplorable indifference to everything but itself.
Nothing can well figure as less "big," in an honest thesis, than a
marked instance of somebody's willingness to pass mainly for an ass. Of
these things I must, I say, have been in strictness aware; what I
perhaps failed of was to note that if a certain romantic glamour (even
that of mere eccentricity or of a fine perversity) may be flung over the
act of exchange of a "career" for the esthetic life in general, the
prose and the modesty of the matter yet come in with any exhibition of
the particular branch of esthetics selected. Then it is that the
attitude of hero or heroine may look too much--for the romantic
effect--like a low crouching over proved trifles. Art indeed has in our
day taken on so many honours and emoluments that the recognition of its
importance is more than a custom, has become on occasion almost a fury:
the line is drawn--especially in the English world--only at the
importance of heeding what it may mean.

The more I turn my pieces over, at any rate, the more I now see I must
have found in them, and I remember how, once well in presence of my
three typical examples, my fear of too ample a canvas quite dropped. The
only question was that if I had marked my political case, from so far
back, for "a story by itself," and then marked my theatrical case for
another, the joining together of these interests, originally seen as
separate, might, all disgracefully, betray the seam, show for mechanical
and superficial. A story was a story, a picture a picture, and I had a
mortal horror of two stories, two pictures, in one. The reason of this
was the clearest--my subject was immediately, under that disadvantage,
so cheated of its indispensable centre as to become of no more use for
expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for
moving a cart. It was a fact, apparently, that one _had_ on occasion
seen two pictures in one; were there not for instance certain sublime
Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which
showed without loss of authority half-a-dozen actions separately taking
place? Yes, that might be, but there had surely been nevertheless a
mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow
thereby come all mysteriously to its own. Of course the affair would be
simple enough if composition could be kept out of the question; yet by
what art or process, what bars and bolts, what unmuzzled dogs and
pointed guns, perform that feat? I had to know myself utterly inapt for
any such valour and recognise that, to make it possible, sundry things
should have begun for me much further back than I had felt them even in
their dawn. A picture without composition slights its most precious
chance for beauty, and is, moreover, not composed at all unless the
painter knows _how_ that principle of health and safety, working as an
absolutely premeditated art, has prevailed. There may in its absence be
life, incontestably, as _The Newcomes_ has life, as _Les Trois
Mousquetaires_, as Tolstoi's _Peace and War_, have it; but what do such
large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the
accidental and the arbitrary, artistically _mean_? We have heard it
maintained, we well remember, that such things are "superior to art";
but we understand least of all what _that_ may mean, and we look in vain
for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid
and tell us. There is life and life, and as waste is only life
sacrificed and thereby prevented from "counting," I delight in a
deep-breathing economy and an organic form. My business was accordingly
to "go in" for complete pictorial fusion, some such common interest
between my two first notions as would, in spite of their birth under
quite different stars, do them no violence at all.

I recall with this confirmed infatuation of retrospect that through the
mild perceptions I here glance at there struck for _The Tragic Muse_ the
first hour of a season of no small subjective felicity; lighted mainly,
I seem to see, by a wide west window that, high aloft, looked over near
and far London sunsets, a half-grey, half-flushed expanse of London
life. The production of the thing, which yet took a good many months,
lives for me again all contemporaneously in that full projection, upon
my very table, of the good fog-filtered Kensington mornings; which had a
way indeed of seeing the sunset in and which at the very last are merged
to memory in a different and a sharper pressure, that of an hotel
bedroom in Paris during the autumn of 1889, with the Exposition du
Centenaire about to end--and my long story, through the usual
difficulties, as well. The usual difficulties--and I fairly cherish the
record as some adventurer in another line may hug the sense of his
inveterate habit of just saving in time the neck he ever
undiscourageably risks--were those bequeathed as a particular vice of
the artistic spirit, against which vigilance had been destined from the
first to exert itself in vain, and the effect of which was that again
and again, perversely, incurably, the centre of my structure would
insist on placing itself _not_, so to speak, in the middle. It mattered
little that the reader with the idea or the suspicion of a structural
centre is the rarest of friends and of critics--a bird, it would seem,
as merely fabled as the phoenix: the terminational terror was none the
less certain to break in and my work threaten to masquerade for me as an
active figure condemned to the disgrace of legs too short, ever so much
too short, for its body. I urge myself to the candid confession that in
very few of my productions, to my eye, _has_ the organic centre
succeeded in getting into proper position.

Time after time, then, has the precious waistband or girdle, studded and
buckled and placed for brave outward show, practically worked itself,
and in spite of desperate remonstrance, or in other words essential
counterplotting, to a point perilously near the knees--perilously I mean
for the freedom of these parts. In several of my compositions this
displacement has so succeeded, at the crisis, in defying and resisting
me, has appeared so fraught with probable dishonour, that I still turn
upon them, in spite of the greater or less success of final
dissimulation, a rueful and wondering eye. These productions have in
fact, if I may be so bold about it, specious and spurious centres
altogether, to make up for the failure of the true. As to which in my
list they are, however, that is another business, not on any terms to be
made known. Such at least would seem my resolution so far as I have
thus proceeded. Of any attention ever arrested by the pages forming the
object of this reference that rigour of discrimination has wholly and
consistently failed, I gather, to constitute a part. In which fact there
is perhaps after all a rough justice--since the infirmity I speak of,
for example, has been always but the direct and immediate fruit of a
positive excess of foresight, the overdone desire to provide for future
need and lay up heavenly treasure against the demands of my climax. If
the art of the drama, as a great French master of it has said, is above
all the art of preparations, that is true only to a less extent of the
art of the novel, and true exactly in the degree in which the art of the
particular novel comes near that of the drama. The first half of a
fiction insists ever on figuring to me as the stage or theatre for the
second half, and I have in general given so much space to making the
theatre propitious that my halves have too often proved strangely
unequal. Thereby has arisen with grim regularity the question of
artfully, of consummately masking the fault and conferring on the false
quantity the brave appearance of the true.

But I am far from pretending that these desperations of ingenuity have
not--as through seeming _most_ of the very essence of the problem--their
exasperated charm; so far from it that my particular supreme predicament
in the Paris hotel, after an undue primary leakage of time, no doubt,
over at the great river-spanning museum of the Champ de Mars and the
Trocadero, fairly takes on to me now the tender grace of a day that is
dead. Re-reading the last chapters of _The Tragic Muse_ I catch again
the very odour of Paris, which comes up in the rich rumble of the Rue de
la Paix--with which my room itself, for that matter, seems
impregnated--and which hangs for reminiscence about the embarrassed
effort to "finish," not ignobly, within my already exceeded limits; an
effort prolonged each day to those late afternoon hours during which the
tone of the terrible city seemed to deepen about one to an effect
strangely composed at once of the auspicious and the fatal. The "plot"
of Paris thickened at such hours beyond any other plot in the world, I
think; but there one sat meanwhile with another, on one's hands,
absolutely requiring precedence. Not the least imperative of one's
conditions was thus that one should have really, should have finely and
(given one's scale) concisely treated one's subject, in spite of there
being so much of the confounded irreducible quantity still to treat. If
I spoke just now, however, of the "exasperated" charm of supreme
difficulty, that is because the challenge of economic representation so
easily becomes, in any of the arts, intensely interesting to meet. To
put all that is possible of one's idea into a form and compass that will
contain and express it only by delicate adjustments and an exquisite
chemistry, so that there will at the end be neither a drop of one's
liquor left nor a hair's breadth of the rim of one's glass to
spare--every artist will remember how often that sort of necessity has
carried with it its particular inspiration. Therein lies the secret of
the appeal, to his mind, of the successfully _foreshortened_ thing,
where representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had
occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has for its
attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of figuring
synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick,
as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed,
I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the "thick," the false, the
dissembling second half of the work before me, associated throughout
with the effort to weight my dramatic values as heavily as might be,
since they had to be so few, presents that effort as at the very last a
quite convulsive, yet in its way highly agreeable, spasm. Of such mild
prodigies is the "history" of any specific creative effort composed!

But I have got too much out of the "old" Kensington light of twenty
years ago--a lingering oblique ray of which, to-day surely quite
extinct, played for a benediction over my canvas. From the moment I made
out, at my high-perched west window, my lucky title, that is from the
moment Miriam Rooth herself had given it me, so this young woman had
given me with it her own position in the book, and so that in turn had
given me my precious unity, to which no more than Miriam was either Nick
Dormer or Peter Sherringham to be sacrificed. Much of the interest of
the matter was immediately, therefore, in working out the detail of that
unity and--always entrancing range of questions--the order, the reason,
the relation, of presented aspects. With three _general_ aspects, that
of Miriam's case, that of Nick's and that of Sherringham's, there was
work in plenty cut out; since happy as it might be to say, "My several
actions beautifully become one," the point of the affair would be in
_showing_ them beautifully become so--without which showing foul failure
hovered and pounced. Well, the pleasure of handling an action (or,
otherwise expressed, of a "story") is at the worst, for a storyteller,
immense, and the interest of such a question as for example keeping Nick
Dormer's story his and yet making it also and all effectively in a large
part Peter Sherringham's, of keeping Sherringham's his and yet making it
in its high degree his kinsman's too, and Miriam Rooth's into the
bargain; just as Miriam Rooth's is by the same token quite operatively
his and Nick's, and just as that of each of the young men, by an equal
logic, is very contributively hers--the interest of such a question, I
say, is ever so considerably the interest of the system on which the
whole thing is done. I see to-day that it was but half a system to say,
"Oh Miriam, a case herself, is the _link_ between the two other cases";
that device was to ask for as much help as it gave and to require a good
deal more application than it announced on the surface. The sense of a
system saves the painter from the baseness of the _arbitrary_ stroke,
the touch without its reason, but as payment for that service the
process insists on being kept impeccably the right one.

These are intimate truths indeed, of which the charm mainly comes out
but on experiment and in practice; yet I like to have it well before me
here that, after all, _The Tragic Muse_ makes it not easy to say which
of the situations concerned in it predominates and rules. What has
become in that imperfect order, accordingly, of the famous centre of
one's subject? It is surely not in Nick's consciousness--since why, if
it be, are we treated to such an intolerable dose of Sherringham's? It
can't be in Sherringham's--we have for that altogether an excess of
Nick's. How, on the other hand, can it be in Miriam's, given that we
have no direct exhibition of hers whatever, that we get at it all
inferentially and inductively, seeing it only through a more or less
bewildered interpretation of it by others. The emphasis is all on an
absolutely objective Miriam, and, this affirmed, how--with such an
amount of exposed subjectivity all round her--can so dense a medium be a
centre? Such questions as those go straight--thanks to which they are, I
profess, delightful; going straight they are of the sort that makes
answers possible. Miriam _is_ central then to analysis, in spite of
being objective; central in virtue of the fact that the whole thing has
visibly, from the first, to get itself done in dramatic, or at least in
scenic conditions--though scenic conditions which are as near an
approach to the dramatic as the novel may permit itself and which have
this in common with the latter, that they move in the light of
_alternation_. This imposes a consistency other than that of the novel
at its loosest, and, for one's subject, a different view and a different
placing of the centre. The charm of the scenic consistency, the
consistency of the multiplication of _aspects_, that of making them
amusingly various, had haunted the author of _The Tragic Muse_ from far
back, and he was in due course to yield to it all luxuriously, too
luxuriously perhaps, in _The Awkward Age_, as will doubtless with the
extension of these remarks be complacently shown.

To put himself at any rate as much as possible under the protection of
it had been ever his practice (he had notably done so in _The Princess
Casamassima_, so frankly panoramic and processional); and in what case
could this protection have had more price than in the one before us? No
character in a play (any play not a mere monologue) has, for the right
expression of the thing, a _usurping_ consciousness; the consciousness
of others is exhibited exactly in the same way as that of the "hero";
the prodigious consciousness of Hamlet, the most capacious and most
crowded, the moral presence the most asserted, in the whole range of
fiction, only takes its turn with that of the other agents of the story,
no matter how occasional these may be. It is left, in other words, to
answer for itself equally with theirs: wherefore (by a parity of
reasoning if not of example) Miriam's might without inconsequence be
placed on the same footing; and all in spite of the fact that the "moral
presence" of each of the men most importantly concerned with her--or
with the second of whom she at least is importantly concerned--_is_
independently answered for. The idea of the book being, as I have said,
a picture of some of the personal consequences of the art-appetite
raised to intensity, swollen to voracity, the heavy emphasis falls where
the symbol of some of the complications so begotten might be made (as I
judged, heaven forgive me!) most "amusing": amusing I mean in the best
very modern sense. I never "go behind" Miriam; only poor Sherringham
goes, a great deal, and Nick Dormer goes a little, and the author, while
they so waste wonderment, goes behind _them_: but none the less she is
as thoroughly symbolic, as functional, for illustration of the idea, as
either of them, while her image had seemed susceptible of a livelier and
"prettier" concretion. I had desired for her, I remember, all manageable
vividness--so ineluctable had it long appeared to "do the actress," to
touch the theatre, to meet that connexion somehow or other, in any free
plunge of the speculative fork into the contemporary social salad.

The late R. L. Stevenson was to write to me, I recall--and precisely on
the occasion of _The Tragic Muse_--that he was at a loss to conceive how
one could find an interest in anything so vulgar or pretend to gather
fruit in so scrubby an orchard; but the view of a creature of the stage,
the view of the "histrionic temperament," as suggestive much less,
verily, in respect to the poor stage _per se_ than in respect to "art"
at large, affected me in spite of that as justly tenable. An objection
of a more pointed order was forced upon me by an acute friend later on
and in another connexion: the challenge of one's right, in any pretended
show of social realities, to attach to the image of a "public
character," a supposed particular celebrity, a range of interest, of
intrinsic distinction, greater than any such display of importance on
the part of eminent members of the class as we see them about us. There
_was_ a nice point if one would--yet only nice enough, after all, to be
easily amusing. We shall deal with it later on, however, in a more
urgent connexion. What would have worried me much more had it dawned
earlier is the light lately thrown by that admirable writer M. Anatole
France on the question of any animated view of the histrionic
temperament--a light that may well dazzle to distress any ingenuous
worker in the same field. In those parts of his brief but inimitable
_Histoire Comique_ on which he is most to be congratulated--for there
are some that prompt to reserves--he has "done the actress," as well as
the actor, done above all the mountebank, the mummer and the _cabotin_,
and mixed them up with the queer theatric air, in a manner that
practically warns all other hands off the material for ever. At the same
time I think I saw Miriam, and without a sacrifice of truth, that is of
the particular glow of verisimilitude I wished her most to benefit by,
in a complexity of relations finer than any that appear possible for the
gentry of M. Anatole France.

Her relation to Nick Dormer, for instance, was intended as a superior
interest--that of being (while perfectly sincere, sincere for _her_, and
therefore perfectly consonant with her impulse perpetually to perform
and with her success in performing) the result of a touched imagination,
a touched pride for "art," as well as of the charm cast on other
sensibilities still. Dormer's relation to herself is a different matter,
of which more presently; but the sympathy she, poor young woman, very
generously and intelligently offers him where most people have so
stinted it, is disclosed largely at the cost of her egotism and her
personal pretensions, even though in fact determined by her sense of
their together, Nick and she, postponing the "world" to their conception
of other and finer decencies. Nick can't on the whole see--for I have
represented him as in his day quite sufficiently troubled and
anxious--why he should condemn to ugly feebleness his most prized
faculty (most prized, at least, by himself) even in order to keep his
seat in Parliament, to inherit Mr. Carteret's blessing and money, to
gratify his mother and carry out the mission of his father, to marry
Julia Dallow in fine, a beautiful imperative woman with a great many
thousands a year. It all comes back in the last analysis to the
individual vision of decency, the critical as well as the passionate
judgement of it under sharp stress; and Nick's vision and judgement, all
on the esthetic ground, have beautifully coincided, to Miriam's
imagination, with a now fully marked, an inspired and impenitent, choice
of her own: so that, other considerations powerfully aiding indeed, she
is ready to see their interest all splendidly as one. She is in the
uplifted state to which sacrifices and submissions loom large, but loom
so just because they must write sympathy, write passion, large. Her
measure of what she would be capable of for him--capable, that is, of
_not_ asking of him--will depend on what he shall ask of _her_, but she
has no fear of not being able to satisfy him, even to the point of
"chucking" for him, if need be, that artistic identity of her own which
she has begun to build up. It will all be to the glory, therefore, of
their common infatuation with "art": she will doubtless be no less
willing to serve his than she was eager to serve her own, purged now of
the too great shrillness.

This puts her quite on a different level from that of the vivid monsters
of M. France, whose artistic identity is the last thing _they_ wish to
chuck--their only dismissal is of all material and social over-draping.
Nick Dormer in point of fact asks of Miriam nothing but that she shall
remain "awfully interesting to paint"; but that is _his_ relation,
which, as I say, is quite a matter by itself. He at any rate, luckily
for both of them it may be, doesn't put her to the test: he is so busy
with his own case, busy with testing himself and feeling his reality.
He has seen himself as giving up precious things for an object, and that
object has somehow not been the young woman in question, nor anything
very nearly like her. She, on the other hand, has asked everything of
Peter Sherringham, who has asked everything of _her_; and it is in so
doing that she has really most testified for art and invited him to
testify. With his professed interest in the theatre--one of those deep
subjections that, in men of "taste," the Comedie Francaise used in old
days to conspire for and some such odd and affecting examples of which
were to be noted--he yet offers her his hand and an introduction to the
very best society if she will leave the stage. The power--and her having
the sense of the power--to "shine" in the world is his highest measure
of her, the test applied by him to her beautiful human value; just as
the manner in which she turns on him is the application of her own
standard and touchstone. She is perfectly sure of her own; for--if there
were nothing else, and there is much--she has tasted blood, so to speak,
in the form of her so prompt and auspicious success with the public,
leaving all probations behind (the whole of which, as the book gives it,
is too rapid and sudden, though inevitably so: processes, periods,
intervals, stages, degrees, connexions, may be easily enough and barely
enough named, may be unconvincingly stated, in fiction, to the deep
discredit of the writer, but it remains the very deuce to _represent_
them, especially represent them under strong compression and in brief
and subordinate terms; and this even though the novelist who doesn't
represent, and represent "all the time," is lost, exactly as much lost
as the painter who, at his work and given his intention, doesn't paint
"all the time").

Turn upon her friend at any rate Miriam does; and one of my main points
is missed if it fails to appear that she does so with absolute
sincerity and with the cold passion of the high critic who knows, on
sight of them together, the more or less dazzling false from the
comparatively grey-coloured true. Sherringham's whole profession has
been that he rejoices in her as she is, and that the theatre, the
organised theatre, will be, as Matthew Arnold was in those very days
pronouncing it, irresistible; and it is the promptness with which he
sheds his pretended faith as soon as it feels in the air the breath of
reality, as soon as it asks of him a proof or a sacrifice, it is this
that excites her doubtless sufficiently arrogant scorn. Where is the
virtue of his high interest if it has verily never _been_ an interest to
speak of and if all it has suddenly to suggest is that, in face of a
serious call, it shall be unblushingly relinquished? If he and she
together, and her great field and future, and the whole cause they had
armed and declared for, have not been serious things they have been base
make-believes and trivialities--which is what in fact the homage of
society to art always turns out so soon as art presumes not to be vulgar
and futile. It is immensely the fashion and immensely edifying to listen
to, this homage, while it confines its attention to vanities and frauds;
but it knows only terror, feels only horror, the moment that, instead of
making all the concessions, art proceeds to ask for a few. Miriam is
nothing if not strenuous, and evidently nothing if not "cheeky," where
Sherringham is concerned at least: these, in the all-egotistical
exhibition to which she is condemned, are the very elements of her
figure and the very colours of her portrait. But she is mild and
inconsequent for Nick Dormer (who demands of her so little); as if
gravely and pityingly embracing the truth that _his_ sacrifice, on the
right side, is probably to have very little of her sort of recompense. I
must have had it well before me that she was all aware of the small
strain a great sacrifice to Nick would cost her--by reason of the strong
effect on her of his own superior logic, in which the very intensity of
concentration was so to find its account.

If the man, however, who holds her personally dear yet holds her
extremely personal message to the world cheap, so the man capable of a
consistency and, as she regards the matter, of an honesty so much higher
than Sherringham's, virtually cares, "really" cares, no straw for his
fellow-struggler. If Nick Dormer attracts and all-indifferently holds
her it is because, like herself and unlike Peter, he puts "art" first;
but the most he thus does for her in the event is to let her see how she
may enjoy, in intimacy, the rigour it has taught him and which he
cultivates at her expense. This is the situation in which we leave her,
though there would be more still to be said about the difference for her
of the two relations--that to each of the men--could I fondly suppose as
much of the interest of the book "left over" for the reader as for
myself. Sherringham, for instance, offers Miriam marriage, ever so
"handsomely"; but if nothing might lead me on further than the question
of what it would have been open to us--us novelists, especially in the
old days--to show, "serially," a young man in Nick Dormer's quite
different position as offering or a young woman in Miriam's as taking,
so for that very reason such an excursion is forbidden me. The trade of
the stage-player, and above all of the actress, must have so many
detestable sides for the person exercising it that we scarce imagine a
full surrender to it without a full surrender, not less, to every
immediate compensation, to every freedom and the largest ease within
reach: which presentment of the possible case for Miriam would yet have
been condemned--and on grounds both various and interesting to trace--to
remain very imperfect.

I feel, moreover, that I might still, with space, abound in remarks
about Nick's character and Nick's crisis suggested to my present more
reflective vision. It strikes me, alas, that he is not quite so
interesting as he was fondly intended to be, and this in spite of the
multiplication, within the picture, of his pains and penalties; so that
while I turn this slight anomaly over I come upon a reason that affects
me as singularly charming and touching and at which indeed I have
already glanced. Any presentation of the artist _in triumph_ must be
flat in proportion as it really sticks to its subject--it can only
smuggle in relief and variety. For, to put the matter in an image, all
we then--in his triumph--see of the charm-compeller is the back he turns
to us as he bends over his work. "His" triumph, decently, is but the
triumph of what he produces, and that is another affair. His romance is
the romance he himself projects; he eats the cake of the very rarest
privilege, the most luscious baked in the oven of the gods--therefore he
mayn't "have" it, in the form of the privilege of the hero, at the same
time. The privilege of the hero--that is, of the martyr or of the
interesting and appealing and comparatively floundering _person_--places
him in quite a different category, belongs to him only as to the artist
deluded, diverted, frustrated or vanquished; when the "amateur" in him
gains, for our admiration or compassion or whatever, all that the expert
has to do without. Therefore I strove in vain, I feel, to embroil and
adorn this young man on whom a hundred ingenious touches are thus
lavished: he has insisted in the event on looking as simple and flat as
some mere brass check or engraved number, the symbol and guarantee of a
stored treasure. The better part of him is locked too much away from us,
and the part we see has to pass for--well, what it passes for, so
lamentedly, among his friends and relatives. No, accordingly, Nick
Dormer isn't "the best thing in the book," as I judge I imagined he
would be, and it contains nothing better, I make out, than that
preserved and achieved unity and quality of tone, a value in itself,
which I referred to at the beginning of these remarks. What I mean by
this is that the interest created, and the expression of that interest,
are things kept, as to kind, genuine and true to themselves. The appeal,
the fidelity to the prime motive, is, with no little art, strained clear
(even as silver is polished) in a degree answering--at least by
intention--to the air of beauty. There is an awkwardness again in having
thus belatedly to point such features out; but in that wrought
appearance of animation and harmony, that effect of free movement and
yet of recurrent and insistent reference, _The Tragic Muse_ has struck
me again as conscious of a bright advantage.

HENRY JAMES.




BOOK FIRST




I


The people of France have made it no secret that those of England, as a
general thing, are to their perception an inexpressive and speechless
race, perpendicular and unsociable, unaddicted to enriching any bareness
of contact with verbal or other embroidery. This view might have derived
encouragement, a few years ago, in Paris, from the manner in which four
persons sat together in silence, one fine day about noon, in the garden,
as it is called, of the Palais de l'Industrie--the central court of the
great glazed bazaar where, among plants and parterres, gravelled walks
and thin fountains, are ranged the figures and groups, the monuments and
busts, which form in the annual exhibition of the Salon the department
of statuary. The spirit of observation is naturally high at the Salon,
quickened by a thousand artful or artless appeals, but it need have put
forth no great intensity to take in the characters I mention. As a
solicitation of the eye on definite grounds these visitors too
constituted a successful plastic fact; and even the most superficial
observer would have marked them as products of an insular neighbourhood,
representatives of that tweed-and-waterproof class with which, on the
recurrent occasions when the English turn out for a holiday--Christmas
and Easter, Whitsuntide and the autumn--Paris besprinkles itself at a
night's notice. They had about them the indefinable professional look
of the British traveller abroad; the air of preparation for exposure,
material and moral, which is so oddly combined with the serene
revelation of security and of persistence, and which excites, according
to individual susceptibility, the ire or the admiration of foreign
communities. They were the more unmistakable as they presented mainly
the happier aspects of the energetic race to which they had the honour
to belong. The fresh diffused light of the Salon made them clear and
important; they were finished creations, in their way, and, ranged there
motionless on their green bench, were almost as much on exhibition as if
they had been hung on the line.

Three ladies and a young man, they were obviously a family--a mother,
two daughters and a son; a circumstance which had the effect at once of
making each member of the group doubly typical and of helping to account
for their fine taciturnity. They were not, with each other, on terms of
ceremony, and also were probably fatigued with their course among the
pictures, the rooms on the upper floor. Their attitude, on the part of
visitors who had superior features even if they might appear to some
passers-by to have neglected a fine opportunity for completing these
features with an expression, was after all a kind of tribute to the
state of exhaustion, of bewilderment, to which the genius of France is
still capable of reducing the proud.

"En v'la des abrutis!" more than one of their fellow-gazers might have
been heard to exclaim; and certain it is that there was something
depressed and discouraged in this interesting group, who sat looking
vaguely before them, not noticing the life of the place, somewhat as if
each had a private anxiety. It might have been finely guessed, however,
that though on many questions they were closely united this present
anxiety was not the same for each. If they looked grave, moreover, this
was doubtless partly the result of their all being dressed in such
mourning as told of a recent bereavement. The eldest of the three ladies
had indeed a face of a fine austere mould which would have been moved to
gaiety only by some force more insidious than any she was likely to
recognise in Paris. Cold, still, and considerably worn, it was neither
stupid nor hard--it was firm, narrow and sharp. This competent matron,
acquainted evidently with grief but not weakened by it, had a high
forehead to which the quality of the skin gave a singular polish--it
glittered even when seen at a distance; a nose which achieved a high
free curve; and a tendency to throw back her head and carry it well
above her, as if to disengage it from the possible entanglements of the
rest of her person. If you had seen her walk you would have felt her to
tread the earth after a fashion suggesting that in a world where she had
long since discovered that one couldn't have one's own way one could
never tell what annoying aggression might take place, so that it was
well, from hour to hour, to save what one could. Lady Agnes saved her
head, her white triangular forehead, over which her close-crinkled
flaxen hair, reproduced in different shades in her children, made a
looped silken canopy like the marquee at a garden-party. Her daughters
were as tall as herself--that was visible even as they sat there--and
one of them, the younger evidently, altogether pretty; a straight,
slender, grey-eyed English girl of the sort who show "good" figures and
fresh complexions. The sister, who was not pretty, was also straight and
slender and grey-eyed. But the grey in this case was not so pure, nor
were the straightness and the slenderness so maidenly. The brother of
these young ladies had taken off his hat as if he felt the air of the
summer day heavy in the great pavilion. He was a lean, strong,
clear-faced youth, with a formed nose and thick light-brown hair which
lay continuously and profusely back from his forehead, so that to smooth
it from the brow to the neck but a single movement of the hand was
required. I cannot describe him better than by saying that he was the
sort of young Englishman who looks particularly well in strange lands
and whose general aspect--his inches, his limbs, his friendly eyes, the
modulation of his voice, the cleanness of his flesh-tints and the
fashion of his garments--excites on the part of those who encounter him
in far countries on the ground of a common speech a delightful sympathy
of race. This sympathy may sometimes be qualified by the seen limits of
his apprehension, but it almost revels as such horizons recede. We shall
see quickly enough how accurate a measure it might have taken of
Nicholas Dormer. There was food for suspicion perhaps in the wandering
blankness that sat at moments in his eyes, as if he had no attention at
all, not the least in the world, at his command; but it is no more than
just to add without delay that this discouraging symptom was known among
those who liked him by the indulgent name of dreaminess. By his mother
and sisters, for instance, his dreaminess was constantly noted. He is
the more welcome to the benefit of such an interpretation as there is
always held to be something engaging in the combination of the muscular
and the musing, the mildness of strength.

After some time, an interval during which these good people might have
appeared to have come, individually, to the Palais de l'Industrie much
less to see the works of art than to think over their domestic affairs,
the young man, rousing himself from his reverie, addressed one of the
girls.

"I say, Biddy, why should we sit moping here all day? Come and take a
turn about with me."

His younger sister, while he got up, leaned forward a little, looking
round her, but she gave for the moment no further sign of complying with
his invitation.

"Where shall we find you, then, if Peter comes?" asked the other Miss
Dormer, making no movement at all.

"I daresay Peter won't come. He'll leave us here to cool our heels."

"Oh Nick dear!" Biddy exclaimed in a small sweet voice of protest. It
was plainly her theory that Peter would come, and even a little her fond
fear that she might miss him should she quit that spot.

"We shall come back in a quarter of an hour. Really I must look at these
things," Nick declared, turning his face to a marble group which stood
near them on the right--a man with the skin of a beast round his loins,
tussling with a naked woman in some primitive effort of courtship or
capture.

Lady Agnes followed the direction of her son's eyes and then observed:
"Everything seems very dreadful. I should think Biddy had better sit
still. Hasn't she seen enough horrors up above?"

"I daresay that if Peter comes Julia'll be with him," the elder girl
remarked irrelevantly.

"Well then he can take Julia about. That will be more proper," said Lady
Agnes.

"Mother dear, she doesn't care a rap about art. It's a fearful bore
looking at fine things with Julia," Nick returned.

"Won't you go with him, Grace?"--and Biddy appealed to her sister.

"I think she has awfully good taste!" Grace exclaimed, not answering
this inquiry.

"_Don't_ say nasty things about her!" Lady Agnes broke out solemnly to
her son after resting her eyes on him a moment with an air of reluctant
reprobation.

"I say nothing but what she'd say herself," the young man urged. "About
some things she has very good taste, but about this kind of thing she
has no taste at all."

"That's better, I think," said Lady Agnes, turning her eyes again to the
"kind of thing" her son appeared to designate.

"She's awfully clever--awfully!" Grace went on with decision.

"Awfully, awfully!" her brother repeated, standing in front of her and
smiling down at her.

"You are nasty, Nick. You know you are," said the young lady, but more
in sorrow than in anger.

Biddy got up at this, as if the accusatory tone prompted her to place
herself generously at his side. "Mightn't you go and order lunch--in
that place, you know?" she asked of her mother. "Then we'd come back
when it was ready."

"My dear child, I can't order lunch," Lady Agnes replied with a cold
impatience which seemed to intimate that she had problems far more
important than those of victualling to contend with.

"Then perhaps Peter will if he comes. I'm sure he's up in everything of
that sort."

"Oh hang Peter!" Nick exclaimed. "Leave him out of account, and _do_
order lunch, mother; but not cold beef and pickles."

"I must say--about _him_--you're not nice," Biddy ventured to remark to
her brother, hesitating and even blushing a little.

"You make up for it, my dear," the young man answered, giving her
chin--a very charming, rotund, little chin--a friendly whisk with his
forefinger.

"I can't imagine what you've got against him," her ladyship said
gravely.

"Dear mother, it's disappointed fondness," Nick argued. "They won't
answer one's notes; they won't let one know where they are nor what to
expect. 'Hell has no fury like a woman scorned'; nor like a man
either."

"Peter has such a tremendous lot to do--it's a very busy time at the
embassy; there are sure to be reasons," Biddy explained with her pretty
eyes.

"Reasons enough, no doubt!" said Lady Agnes--who accompanied these words
with an ambiguous sigh, however, as if in Paris even the best reasons
would naturally be bad ones.

"Doesn't Julia write to you, doesn't she answer you the very day?" Grace
asked, looking at Nick as if she were the bold one.

He waited, returning her glance with a certain severity. "What do you
know about my correspondence? No doubt I ask too much," he went on; "I'm
so attached to them. Dear old Peter, dear old Julia!"

"She's younger than you, my dear!" cried the elder girl, still resolute.

"Yes, nineteen days."

"I'm glad you know her birthday."

"She knows yours; she always gives you something," Lady Agnes reminded
her son.

"Her taste is good _then_, isn't it, Nick?" Grace Dormer continued.

"She makes charming presents; but, dear mother, it isn't _her_ taste.
It's her husband's."

"How her husband's?"

"The beautiful objects of which she disposes so freely are the things he
collected for years laboriously, devotedly, poor man!"

"She disposes of them to you, but not to others," said Lady Agnes. "But
that's all right," she added, as if this might have been taken for a
complaint of the limitations of Julia's bounty. "She has to select among
so many, and that's a proof of taste," her ladyship pursued.

"You can't say she doesn't choose lovely ones," Grace remarked to her
brother in a tone of some triumph.

"My dear, they're all lovely. George Dallow's judgement was so sure, he
was incapable of making a mistake," Nicholas Dormer returned.

"I don't see how you can talk of him, he was dreadful," said Lady Agnes.

"My dear, if he was good enough for Julia to marry he's good enough for
us to talk of."

"She did him a very great honour."

"I daresay, but he was not unworthy of it. No such enlightened
collection of beautiful objects has been made in England in our time."

"You think too much of beautiful objects!" Lady Agnes sighed.

"I thought you were just now lamenting that I think too little."

"It's very nice--his having left Julia so well off," Biddy interposed
soothingly, as if she foresaw a tangle.

"He treated her _en grand seigneur_, absolutely," Nick went on.

"He used to look greasy, all the same"--Grace bore on it with a dull
weight. "His name ought to have been Tallow."

"You're not saying what Julia would like, if that's what you are trying
to say," her brother observed.

"Don't be vulgar, Grace," said Lady Agnes.

"I know Peter Sherringham's birthday!" Biddy broke out innocently, as a
pacific diversion. She had passed her hand into Nick's arm, to signify
her readiness to go with him, while she scanned the remoter reaches of
the garden as if it had occurred to her that to direct their steps in
some such sense might after all be the shorter way to get at Peter.

"He's too much older than you, my dear," Grace answered without
encouragement.

"That's why I've noticed it--he's thirty-four. Do you call that too
old? I don't care for slobbering infants!" Biddy cried.

"Don't be vulgar," Lady Agnes enjoined again.

"Come, Bid, we'll go and be vulgar together; for that's what we are, I'm
afraid," her brother said to her. "We'll go and look at all these low
works of art."

"Do you really think it's necessary to the child's development?" Lady
Agnes demanded as the pair turned away. And then while her son, struck
as by a challenge, paused, lingering a moment with his little sister on
his arm: "What we've been through this morning in this place, and what
you've paraded before our eyes--the murders, the tortures, all kinds of
disease and indecency!"

Nick looked at his mother as if this sudden protest surprised him, but
as if also there were lurking explanations of it which he quickly
guessed. Her resentment had the effect not so much of animating her cold
face as of making it colder, less expressive, though visibly prouder.
"Ah dear mother, don't do the British matron!" he replied
good-humouredly.

"British matron's soon said! I don't know what they're coming to."

"How odd that you should have been struck only with the disagreeable
things when, for myself, I've felt it to be most interesting, the most
suggestive morning I've passed for ever so many months!"

"Oh Nick, Nick!" Lady Agnes cried with a strange depth of feeling.

"I like them better in London--they're much less unpleasant," said Grace
Dormer.

"They're things you can look at," her ladyship went on. "We certainly
make the better show."

"The subject doesn't matter, it's the treatment, the treatment!" Biddy
protested in a voice like the tinkle of a silver bell.

"Poor little Bid!"--her brother broke into a laugh.

"How can I learn to model, mamma dear, if I don't look at things and if
I don't study them?" the girl continued.

This question passed unheeded, and Nicholas Dormer said to his mother,
more seriously, but with a certain kind explicitness, as if he could
make a particular allowance: "This place is an immense stimulus to me;
it refreshes me, excites me--it's such an exhibition of artistic life.
It's full of ideas, full of refinements; it gives one such an impression
of artistic experience. They try everything, they feel everything. While
you were looking at the murders, apparently, I observed an immense deal
of curious and interesting work. There are too many of them, poor
devils; so many who must make their way, who must attract attention.
Some of them can only _taper fort_, stand on their heads, turn
somersaults or commit deeds of violence, to make people notice them.
After that, no doubt, a good many will be quieter. But I don't know;
to-day I'm in an appreciative mood--I feel indulgent even to them: they
give me an impression of intelligence, of eager observation. All art is
one--remember that, Biddy dear," the young man continued, smiling down
from his height. "It's the same great many-headed effort, and any ground
that's gained by an individual, any spark that's struck in any province,
is of use and of suggestion to all the others. We're all in the same
boat."

"'We,' do you say, my dear? Are you really setting up for an artist?"
Lady Agnes asked.

Nick just hesitated. "I was speaking for Biddy."

"But you _are_ one, Nick--you are!" the girl cried.

Lady Agnes looked for an instant as if she were going to say once more
"Don't be vulgar!" But she suppressed these words, had she intended
them, and uttered sounds, few in number and not completely articulate,
to the effect that she hated talking about art. While her son spoke she
had watched him as if failing to follow; yet something in the tone of
her exclamation hinted that she had understood him but too well.

"We're all in the same boat," Biddy repeated with cheerful zeal.

"Not me, if you please!" Lady Agnes replied. "It's horrid messy work,
your modelling."

"Ah but look at the results!" said the girl eagerly--glancing about at
the monuments in the garden as if in regard even to them she were,
through that unity of art her brother had just proclaimed, in some
degree an effective cause.

"There's a great deal being done here--a real vitality," Nicholas Dormer
went on to his mother in the same reasonable informing way. "Some of
these fellows go very far."

"They do indeed!" said Lady Agnes.

"I'm fond of young schools--like this movement in sculpture," Nick
insisted with his slightly provoking serenity.

"They're old enough to know better!"

"Mayn't I look, mamma? It _is_ necessary to my development," Biddy
declared.

"You may do as you like," said Lady Agnes with dignity.

"She ought to see good work, you know," the young man went on.

"I leave it to your sense of responsibility." This statement was
somewhat majestic, and for a moment evidently it tempted Nick, almost
provoked him, or at any rate suggested to him an occasion for some
pronouncement he had had on his mind. Apparently, however, he judged the
time on the whole not quite right, and his sister Grace interposed with
the inquiry--

"Please, mamma, are we never going to lunch?"

"Ah mother, mother!" the young man murmured in a troubled way, looking
down at her with a deep fold in his forehead.

For Lady Agnes also, as she returned his look, it seemed an occasion;
but with this difference that she had no hesitation in taking advantage
of it. She was encouraged by his slight embarrassment, for ordinarily
Nick was not embarrassed. "You used to have so _much_ sense of
responsibility," she pursued; "but sometimes I don't know what has
become of it--it seems all, _all_ gone!"

"Ah mother, mother!" he exclaimed again--as if there were so many things
to say that it was impossible to choose. But now he stepped closer, bent
over her and in spite of the publicity of their situation gave her a
quick expressive kiss. The foreign observer whom I took for granted in
beginning to sketch this scene would have had to admit that the rigid
English family had after all a capacity for emotion. Grace Dormer indeed
looked round her to see if at this moment they were noticed. She judged
with satisfaction that they had escaped.




II


Nick Dormer walked away with Biddy, but he had not gone far before he
stopped in front of a clever bust, where his mother, in the distance,
saw him playing in the air with his hand, carrying out by this gesture,
which presumably was applausive, some critical remark he had made to his
sister. Lady Agnes raised her glass to her eyes by the long handle to
which rather a clanking chain was attached, perceiving that the bust
represented an ugly old man with a bald head; at which her ladyship
indefinitely sighed, though it was not apparent in what way such an
object could be detrimental to her daughter. Nick passed on and quickly
paused again; this time, his mother discerned, before the marble image
of a strange grimacing woman. Presently she lost sight of him; he
wandered behind things, looking at them all round.

"I ought to get plenty of ideas for my modelling, oughtn't I, Nick?" his
sister put to him after a moment.

"Ah my poor child, what shall I say?"

"Don't you think I've any capacity for ideas?" the girl continued
ruefully.

"Lots of them, no doubt. But the capacity for applying them, for putting
them into practice--how much of that have you?"

"How can I tell till I try?"

"What do you mean by trying, Biddy dear?"

"Why you know--you've seen me."

"Do you call that trying?" her brother amusedly demanded.

"Ah Nick!" she said with sensibility. But then with more spirit: "And
please what do you call it?"

"Well, this for instance is a good case." And her companion pointed to
another bust--a head of a young man in terra-cotta, at which they had
just arrived; a modern young man to whom, with his thick neck, his
little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the artist had given the
air of some sturdy Florentine of the time of Lorenzo.

Biddy looked at the image a moment. "Ah that's not trying; that's
succeeding."

"Not altogether; it's only trying seriously."

"Well, why shouldn't I be serious?"

"Mother wouldn't like it. She has inherited the fine old superstition
that art's pardonable only so long as it's bad--so long as it's done at
odd hours, for a little distraction, like a game of tennis or of whist.
The only thing that can justify it, the effort to carry it as far as one
can (which you can't do without time and singleness of purpose), she
regards as just the dangerous, the criminal element. It's the oddest
hind-part-before view, the drollest immorality."

"She doesn't want one to be professional," Biddy returned as if she
could do justice to every system.

"Better leave it alone then. There are always duffers enough."

"I don't want to be a duffer," Biddy said. "But I thought you encouraged
me."

"So I did, my poor child. It was only to encourage myself."

"With your own work--your painting?"

"With my futile, my ill-starred endeavours. Union is strength--so that
we might present a wider front, a larger surface of resistance."

Biddy for a while said nothing and they continued their tour of
observation. She noticed how he passed over some things quickly, his
first glance sufficing to show him if they were worth another, and then
recognised in a moment the figures that made some appeal. His tone
puzzled but his certainty of eye impressed her, and she felt what a
difference there was yet between them--how much longer in every case she
would have taken to discriminate. She was aware of how little she could
judge of the value of a thing till she had looked at it ten minutes;
indeed modest little Biddy was compelled privately to add "And often not
even then." She was mystified, as I say--Nick was often mystifying, it
was his only fault--but one thing was definite: her brother had high
ability. It was the consciousness of this that made her bring out at
last: "I don't so much care whether or no I please mamma, if I please
you."

"Oh don't lean on me. I'm a wretched broken reed--I'm no use _really_!"
he promptly admonished her.

"Do you mean you're a duffer?" Biddy asked in alarm.

"Frightful, frightful!"

"So that you intend to give up your work--to let it alone, as you advise
_me_?"

"It has never been my work, all that business, Biddy. If it had it would
be different. I should stick to it."

"And you _won't_ stick to it?" the girl said, standing before him
open-eyed.

Her brother looked into her eyes a moment, and she had a compunction;
she feared she was indiscreet and was worrying him. "Your questions are
much simpler than the elements out of which my answer should come."

"A great talent--what's simpler than that?"

"One excellent thing, dear Biddy: no talent at all!"

"Well, yours is so real you can't help it."

"We shall see, we shall see," said Nick Dormer. "Let us go look at that
big group."

"We shall see if your talent's real?" Biddy went on as she accompanied
him.

"No; we shall see if, as you say, I can't help it. What nonsense Paris
makes one talk!" the young man added as they stopped in front of the
composition. This was true perhaps, but not in a sense he could find
himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from his first visit to
the French capital: he had often quitted England and usually made a
point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days there on the outward
journey to the Continent or on the return; but at present the feelings,
for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of air and of scene
had been more punctual and more acute than for a long time before, and
stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment, amusement, of the hundred
appeals from that quarter of thought to which on the whole his attention
was apt most frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was
fonder of Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps
as some other captivated aliens: the place had always had the virtue of
quickening in him sensibly the life of reflexion and observation. It was
a good while since his impressions had been so favourable to the city by
the Seine; a good while at all events since they had ministered so to
excitement, to exhilaration, to ambition, even to a restlessness that
was not prevented from being agreeable by the excess of agitation in it.
Nick could have given the reason of this unwonted glow, but his
preference was very much to keep it to himself. Certainly to persons not
deeply knowing, or at any rate not deeply curious, in relation to the
young man's history the explanation might have seemed to beg the
question, consisting as it did of the simple formula that he had at last
come to a crisis. Why a crisis--what was it and why had he not come to
it before? The reader shall learn these things in time if he cares
enough for them.

Our young man had not in any recent year failed to see the Salon, which
the general voice this season pronounced not particularly good. None the
less it was the present exhibition that, for some cause connected with
his "crisis," made him think fast, produced that effect he had spoken of
to his mother as a sense of artistic life. The precinct of the marbles
and bronzes spoke to him especially to-day; the glazed garden, not
florally rich, with its new productions alternating with perfunctory
plants and its queer, damp smell, partly the odour of plastic clay, of
the studios of sculptors, put forth the voice of old associations, of
other visits, of companionships now ended--an insinuating eloquence
which was at the same time somehow identical with the general sharp
contagion of Paris. There was youth in the air, and a multitudinous
newness, for ever reviving, and the diffusion of a hundred talents,
ingenuities, experiments. The summer clouds made shadows on the roof of
the great building; the white images, hard in their crudity, spotted the
place with provocations; the rattle of plates at the restaurant sounded
sociable in the distance, and our young man congratulated himself more
than ever that he had not missed his chance. He felt how it would help
him to settle something. At the moment he made this reflexion his eye
fell upon a person who appeared--just in the first glimpse--to carry out
the idea of help. He uttered a lively ejaculation, which, however, in
its want of finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so
relevant and congruous, was the other party to this encounter.

The girl's attention followed her brother's, resting with it on a young
man who faced them without seeing them, engaged as he was in imparting
to two companions his ideas about one of the works exposed to view. What
Biddy remarked was that this young man was fair and fat and of the
middle stature; he had a round face and a short beard and on his crown a
mere reminiscence of hair, as the fact that he carried his hat in his
hand permitted to be observed. Bridget Dormer, who was quick, placed him
immediately as a gentleman, but as a gentleman unlike any other
gentleman she had ever seen. She would have taken him for very foreign
but that the words proceeding from his mouth reached her ear and imposed
themselves as a rare variety of English. It was not that a foreigner
might not have spoken smoothly enough, nor yet that the speech of this
young man was not smooth. It had in truth a conspicuous and aggressive
perfection, and Biddy was sure no mere learner would have ventured to
play such tricks with the tongue. He seemed to draw rich effects and
wandering airs from it--to modulate and manipulate it as he would have
done a musical instrument. Her view of the gentleman's companions was
less operative, save for her soon making the reflexion that they were
people whom in any country, from China to Peru, you would immediately
have taken for natives. One of them was an old lady with a shawl; that
was the most salient way in which she presented herself. The shawl was
an ancient much-used fabric of embroidered cashmere, such as many ladies
wore forty years ago in their walks abroad and such as no lady wears
to-day. It had fallen half off the back of the wearer, but at the moment
Biddy permitted herself to consider her she gave it a violent jerk and
brought it up to her shoulders again, where she continued to arrange and
settle it, with a good deal of jauntiness and elegance, while she
listened to the talk of the gentleman. Biddy guessed that this little
transaction took place very frequently, and was not unaware of its
giving the old lady a droll, factitious, faded appearance, as if she
were singularly out of step with the age. The other person was very much
younger--she might have been a daughter--and had a pale face, a low
forehead, and thick dark hair. What she chiefly had, however, Biddy
rapidly discovered, was a pair of largely-gazing eyes. Our young friend
was helped to the discovery by the accident of their resting at this
moment for a time--it struck Biddy as very long--on her own. Both these
ladies were clad in light, thin, scant gowns, giving an impression of
flowered figures and odd transparencies, and in low shoes which showed a
great deal of stocking and were ornamented with large rosettes. Biddy's
slightly agitated perception travelled directly to their shoes: they
suggested to her vaguely that the wearers were dancers--connected
possibly with the old-fashioned exhibition of the shawl-dance. By the
time she had taken in so much as this the mellifluous young man had
perceived and addressed himself to her brother. He came on with an
offered hand. Nick greeted him and said it was a happy chance--he was
uncommonly glad to see him.

"I never come across you--I don't know why," Nick added while the two,
smiling, looked each other up and down like men reunited after a long
interval.

"Oh it seems to me there's reason enough: our paths in life are so
different." Nick's friend had a great deal of manner, as was evinced by
his fashion of saluting Biddy without knowing her.

"Different, yes, but not so different as that. Don't we both live in
London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?"

"Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I don't live in the nineteenth century.
_Jamais de la vie_!" the gentleman declared.

"Nor in London either?"

"Yes--when I'm not at Samarcand! But surely we've diverged since the old
days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While the stranger
spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was
she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a
second auditor--a kind of sympathetic gallery. Her life was somehow
filled with shy people, and she immediately knew she had never
encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognise his
cues.

"How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked.

"I know well enough what you used to."

"That's more than I do myself. There were so many things."

"Yes, there are many things--many, many: that's what makes life so
amusing."

"Do you find it amusing?"

"My dear fellow, _c'est a se tordre_. Don't you think so? Ah it was high
time I should meet you--I see. I've an idea you need me."

"Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck his sister
and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was so important as
that, he didn't introduce him.

"There are many gods and this is one of their temples," the mysterious
personage went on. "It's a house of strange idols--isn't it?--and of
some strange and unnatural sacrifices."

To Biddy as much as to her brother this remark might have been offered;
but the girl's eyes turned back to the ladies who for the moment had
lost their companion. She felt irresponsive and feared she should pass
with this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared, English girl, which was
not the type she aimed at; but wasn't even ocular commerce overbold so
long as she hadn't a sign from Nick? The elder of the strange women had
turned her back and was looking at some bronze figure, losing her shawl
again as she did so; but the other stood where their escort had quitted
her, giving all her attention to his sudden sociability with others. Her
arms hung at her sides, her head was bent, her face lowered, so that she
had an odd appearance of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in
this attitude she was striking, though her air was so unconciliatory as
almost to seem dangerous. Did it express resentment at having been
abandoned for another girl? Biddy, who began to be frightened--there was
a moment when the neglected creature resembled a tigress about to
spring--was tempted to cry out that she had no wish whatever to
appropriate the gentleman. Then she made the discovery that the young
lady too had a manner, almost as much as her clever guide, and the rapid
induction that it perhaps meant no more than his. She only looked at
Biddy from beneath her eyebrows, which were wonderfully arched, but
there was ever so much of a manner in the way she did it. Biddy had a
momentary sense of being a figure in a ballet, a dramatic ballet--a
subordinate motionless figure, to be dashed at to music or strangely
capered up to. It would be a very dramatic ballet indeed if this young
person were the heroine. She had magnificent hair, the girl reflected;
and at the same moment heard Nick say to his interlocutor: "You're not
in London--one can't meet you there?"

"I rove, drift, float," was the answer; "my feelings direct me--if such
a life as mine may be said to have a direction. Where there's anything
to feel I try to be there!" the young man continued with his confiding
laugh.

"I should like to get hold of you," Nick returned.

"Well, in that case there would be no doubt the intellectual adventure.
Those are the currents--any sort of personal relation--that govern my
career."

"I don't want to lose you this time," Nick continued in a tone that
excited Biddy's surprise. A moment before, when his friend had said that
he tried to be where there was anything to feel, she had wondered how he
could endure him.

"Don't lose me, don't lose me!" cried the stranger after a fashion which
affected the girl as the highest expression of irresponsibility she had
ever seen. "After all why should you? Let us remain together unless I
interfere"--and he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who
still remained blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them
acquainted. This was an anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so.
Still, there could be no anomaly of Nick's that wouldn't impose itself
on his younger sister.

"Certainly, I keep you," he said, "unless on my side I deprive those
ladies--!"

"Charming women, but it's not an indissoluble union. We meet, we
communicate, we part! They're going--I'm seeing them to the door. I
shall come back." With this Nick's friend rejoined his companions, who
moved away with him, the strange fine eyes of the girl lingering on
Biddy's brother as well as on Biddy herself as they receded.

"Who _is_ he--who _are_ they?" Biddy instantly asked.

"He's a gentleman," Nick made answer--insufficiently, she thought, and
even with a shade of hesitation. He spoke as if she might have supposed
he was not one, and if he was really one why didn't he introduce him?
But Biddy wouldn't for the world have put this question, and he now
moved to the nearest bench and dropped upon it as to await the other's
return. No sooner, however, had his sister seated herself than he said:
"See here, my dear, do you think you had better stay?"

"Do you want me to go back to mother?" the girl asked with a lengthening
visage.

"Well, what do you think?" He asked it indeed gaily enough.

"Is your conversation to be about--about private affairs?"

"No, I can't say that. But I doubt if mother would think it the sort of
thing that's 'necessary to your development.'"

This assertion appeared to inspire her with the eagerness with which she
again broke out: "But who are they--who are they?"

"I know nothing of the ladies. I never saw them before. The man's a
fellow I knew very well at Oxford. He was thought immense fun there.
We've diverged, as he says, and I had almost lost sight of him, but not
so much as he thinks, because I've read him--read him with interest. He
has written a very clever book."

"What kind of a book?"

"A sort of novel."

"What sort of novel?"

"Well, I don't know--with a lot of good writing." Biddy listened to this
so receptively that she thought it perverse her brother should add: "I
daresay Peter will have come if you return to mother."

"I don't care if he has. Peter's nothing to me. But I'll go if you wish
it."

Nick smiled upon her again and then said: "It doesn't signify. We'll all
go."

"All?" she echoed.

"He won't hurt us. On the contrary he'll do us good."

This was possible, the girl reflected in silence, but none the less the
idea struck her as courageous, of their taking the odd young man back to
breakfast with them and with the others, especially if Peter should be
there. If Peter was nothing to her it was singular she should have
attached such importance to this contingency. The odd young man
reappeared, and now that she saw him without his queer female appendages
he seemed personally less weird. He struck her moreover, as generally a
good deal accounted for by the literary character, especially if it were
responsible for a lot of good writing. As he took his place on the bench
Nick said to him, indicating her, "My sister Bridget," and then
mentioned his name, "Mr. Gabriel Nash."

"You enjoy Paris--you're happy here?" Mr. Nash inquired, leaning over
his friend to speak to the girl.

Though his words belonged to the situation it struck her that his tone
didn't, and this made her answer him more dryly than she usually spoke.
"Oh yes, it's very nice."

"And French art interests you? You find things here that please?"

"Oh yes, I like some of them."

Mr. Nash considered her kindly. "I hoped you'd say you like the Academy
better."

"She would if she didn't think you expected it," said Nicholas Dormer.

"Oh Nick!" Biddy protested.

"Miss Dormer's herself an English picture," their visitor pronounced in
the tone of a man whose urbanity was a general solvent.

"That's a compliment if you don't like them!" Biddy exclaimed.

"Ah some of them, some of them; there's a certain sort of thing!" Mr.
Nash continued. "We must feel everything, everything that we can. We're
here for that."

"You do like English art then?" Nick demanded with a slight accent of
surprise.

Mr. Nash indulged his wonder. "My dear Dormer, do you remember the old
complaint I used to make of you? You had formulas that were like walking
in one's hat. One may see something in a case and one may not."

"Upon my word," said Nick, "I don't know any one who was fonder of a
generalisation than you. You turned them off as the man at the
street-corner distributes hand-bills."

"They were my wild oats. I've sown them all."

"We shall see that!"

"Oh there's nothing of them now: a tame, scanty, homely growth. My only
good generalisations are my actions."

"We shall see _them_ then."

"Ah pardon me. You can't see them with the naked eye. Moreover, mine are
principally negative. People's actions, I know, are for the most part
the things they do--but mine are all the things I _don't_ do. There are
so many of those, so many, but they don't produce any effect. And then
all the rest are shades--extremely fine shades."

"Shades of behaviour?" Nick inquired with an interest which surprised
his sister, Mr. Nash's discourse striking her mainly as the twaddle of
the under-world.

"Shades of impression, of appreciation," said the young man with his
explanatory smile. "All my behaviour consists of my feelings."

"Well, don't you show your feelings? You used to!"

"Wasn't it mainly those of disgust?" Nash asked. "Those operate no
longer. I've closed that window."

"Do you mean you like everything?"

"Dear me, no! But I look only at what I do like."

"Do you mean that you've lost the noble faculty of disgust?"

"I haven't the least idea. I never try it. My dear fellow," said Gabriel
Nash, "we've only one life that we know anything about: fancy taking it
up with disagreeable impressions! When then shall we go in for the
agreeable?"

"What do you mean by the agreeable?" Nick demanded.

"Oh the happy moments of our consciousness--the multiplication of those
moments. We must save as many as possible from the dark gulf."

Nick had excited surprise on the part of his sister, but it was now
Biddy's turn to make him open his eyes a little. She raised her sweet
voice in appeal to the stranger.

"Don't you think there are any wrongs in the world--any abuses and
sufferings?"

"Oh so many, so many! That's why one must choose."

"Choose to stop them, to reform them--isn't that the choice?" Biddy
asked. "That's Nick's," she added, blushing and looking at this
personage.

"Ah our divergence--yes!" Mr. Nash sighed. "There are all kinds of
machinery for that--very complicated and ingenious. Your formulas, my
dear Dormer, your formulas!"

"Hang 'em, I haven't got any!" Nick now bravely declared.

"To me personally the simplest ways are those that appeal most," Mr.
Nash went on. "We pay too much attention to the ugly; we notice it, we
magnify it. The great thing is to leave it alone and encourage the
beautiful."

"You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said Nick.

"Ah precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of
appreciation. We must train our special sense. It's capable of
extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that."

"But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is no
affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say? Where are
the fine consequences?" Dormer asked.

"In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence. That's the
most important one we have to do with. _I_ am a fine consequence," said
Gabriel Nash.

Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as to look
at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before, pausing and
turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a heightened colour, an
air of desperation and the question, after a moment: "Are you then an
aesthete?"

"Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat! I've _no_
profession, my dear young lady. I've no _etat civil_. These things are a
part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say, I keep to the
simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do. Merely to be is such a
_metier_; to live such an art; to feel such a career!"

Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her brother
said to his old friend: "And to write?"

"To write? Oh I shall never do it again!"

"You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book of
yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and ingenious."

"My dear fellow, I'm extremely ashamed of that book," said Gabriel Nash.

"Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his
companion exclaimed.

"Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with it. And
why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives other people
of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't _begin_ to have
an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be of the smallest
consequence to you what you may be called. That's rudimentary."

"But if you go in for shades you must also go in for names. You must
distinguish," Nick objected. "The observer's nothing without his
categories, his types and varieties."

"Ah trust him to distinguish!" said Gabriel Nash sweetly. "That's for
his own convenience; he has, privately, a terminology to meet it. That's
one's style. But from the moment it's for the convenience of others the
signs have to be grosser, the shades begin to go. That's a deplorable
hour! Literature, you see, is for the convenience of others. It requires
the most abject concessions. It plays such mischief with one's style
that really I've had to give it up."

"And politics?" Nick asked.

"Well, what about them?" was Mr. Nash's reply with a special cadence as
he watched his friend's sister, who was still examining her statue.
Biddy was divided between irritation and curiosity. She had interposed
space, but she had not gone beyond ear-shot. Nick's question made her
curiosity throb as a rejoinder to his friend's words.

"That, no doubt you'll say, is still far more for the convenience of
others--is still worse for one's style."

Biddy turned round in time to hear Mr. Nash answer: "It has simply
nothing in life to do with shades! I can't say worse for it than that."

Biddy stepped nearer at this and drew still further on her courage.
"Won't mamma be waiting? Oughtn't we to go to luncheon?"

Both the young men looked up at her and Mr. Nash broke out: "You ought
to protest! You ought to save him!"

"To save him?" Biddy echoed.

"He had a style, upon my word he had! But I've seen it go. I've read his
speeches."

"You were capable of that?" Nick laughed.

"For you, yes. But it was like listening to a nightingale in a brass
band."

"I think they were beautiful," Biddy declared.

Her brother got up at this tribute, and Mr. Nash, rising too, said with
his bright colloquial air: "But, Miss Dormer, he had eyes. He was made
to see--to see all over, to see everything. There are so few like that."

"I think he still sees," Biddy returned, wondering a little why Nick
didn't defend himself.

"He sees his 'side,' his dreadful 'side,' dear young lady. Poor man,
fancy your having a 'side'--you, you--and spending your days and your
nights looking at it! I'd as soon pass my life looking at an
advertisement on a hoarding."

"You don't see me some day a great statesman?" said Nick.

"My dear fellow, it's exactly what I've a terror of."

"Mercy! don't you admire them?" Biddy cried.

"It's a trade like another and a method of making one's way which
society certainly condones. But when one can be something better--!"

"Why what in the world is better?" Biddy asked.

The young man gasped and Nick, replying for him, said: "Gabriel Nash is
better! You must come and lunch with us. I must keep you--I must!" he
added.

"We shall save him yet," Mr. Nash kept on easily to Biddy while they
went and the girl wondered still more what her mother would make of
him.




III


After her companions left her Lady Agnes rested for five minutes in
silence with her elder daughter, at the end of which time she observed:
"I suppose one must have food at any rate," and, getting up, quitted the
place where they had been sitting. "And where are we to go? I hate
eating out of doors," she went on.

"Dear me, when one comes to Paris--!" Grace returned in a tone
apparently implying that in so rash an adventure one must be prepared
for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered to where they
saw a large sign of "Buffet" suspended in the air, entering a precinct
reserved for little white-clothed tables, straw-covered chairs and
long-aproned waiters. One of these functionaries approached them with
eagerness and with a _"Mesdames sont seules?"_ receiving in return from
her ladyship the slightly snappish announcement _"Non; nous sommes
beaucoup!"_ He introduced them to a table larger than most of the
others, and under his protection they took their places at it and began
rather languidly and vaguely to consider the question of the repast. The
waiter had placed a _carte_ in Lady Agnes's hands and she studied it,
through her eye-glass, with a failure of interest, while he enumerated
with professional fluency the resources of the establishment and Grace
watched the people at the other tables. She was hungry and had already
broken a morsel from a long glazed roll.

"Not cold beef and pickles, you know," she observed to her mother. Lady
Agnes gave no heed to this profane remark, but dropped her eye-glass and
laid down the greasy document. "What does it signify? I daresay it's all
nasty," Grace continued; and she added inconsequently: "If Peter comes
he's sure to be particular."

"Let him first be particular to come!" her ladyship exclaimed, turning a
cold eye upon the waiter.

_"Poulet chasseur, filets mignons sauce bearnaise,"_ the man suggested.

"You'll give us what I tell you," said Lady Agnes; and she mentioned
with distinctness and authority the dishes of which she desired that the
meal should be composed. He interjected three or four more suggestions,
but as they produced absolutely no impression on her he became silent
and submissive, doing justice apparently to her ideas. For Lady Agnes
had ideas, and, though it had suited her humour ten minutes before to
profess herself helpless in such a case, the manner in which she imposed
them on the waiter as original, practical, and economical, showed the
high executive woman, the mother of children, the daughter of earls, the
consort of an official, the dispenser of hospitality, looking back upon
a lifetime of luncheons. She carried many cares, and the feeding of
multitudes--she was honourably conscious of having fed them decently, as
she had always done everything--had ever been one of them. "Everything's
absurdly dear," she remarked to her daughter as the waiter went away. To
this remark Grace made no answer. She had been used for a long time back
to hearing that everything was very dear; it was what one always
expected. So she found the case herself, but she was silent and
inventive about it, and nothing further passed, in the way of
conversation with her mother, while they waited for the latter's orders
to be executed, till Lady Agnes reflected audibly: "He makes me unhappy,
the way he talks about Julia."

"Sometimes I think he does it to torment one. One can't mention her!"
Grace responded.

"It's better not to mention her, but to leave it alone."

"Yet he never mentions her of himself."

"In some cases that's supposed to show that people like people--though
of course something more's required to prove it," Lady Agnes continued
to meditate. "Sometimes I think he's thinking of her, then at others I
can't fancy _what_ he's thinking of."

"It would be awfully suitable," said Grace, biting her roll.

Her companion had a pause, as if looking for some higher ground to put
it upon. Then she appeared to find this loftier level in the
observation: "Of course he must like her--he has known her always."

"Nothing can be plainer than that she likes him," Grace opined.

"Poor Julia!" Lady Agnes almost wailed; and her tone suggested that she
knew more about that than she was ready to state.

"It isn't as if she wasn't clever and well read," her daughter went on.
"If there were nothing else there would be a reason in her being so
interested in politics, in everything that he is."

"Ah what Nick is--that's what I sometimes wonder!"

Grace eyed her parent in some despair: "Why, mother, isn't he going to
be like papa?" She waited for an answer that didn't come; after which
she pursued: "I thought you thought him so like him already."

"Well, I don't," said Lady Agnes quietly.

"Who is then? Certainly Percy isn't."

Lady Agnes was silent a space. "There's no one like your father."

"Dear papa!" Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid transition:
"It would be so jolly for all of us--she'd be so nice to us."

"She's that already--in her way," said Lady Agnes conscientiously,
having followed the return, quick as it was. "Much good does it do her!"
And she reproduced the note of her bitterness of a moment before.

"It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do, and I
think she knows it," Grace declared. "One can at any rate keep other
women off."

"Don't meddle--you're very clumsy," was her mother's not particularly
sympathetic rejoinder. "There are other women who are beautiful, and
there are others who are clever and rich."

"Yes, but not all in one: that's what's so nice in Julia. Her fortune
would be thrown in; he wouldn't appear to have married her for it."

"If he does he won't," said Lady Agnes a trifle obscurely.

"Yes, that's what's so charming. And he could do anything then, couldn't
he?"

"Well, your father had no fortune to speak of."

"Yes, but didn't Uncle Percy help him?"

"His wife helped him," said Lady Agnes.

"Dear mamma!"--the girl was prompt. "There's one thing," she added:
"that Mr. Carteret will always help Nick."

"What do you mean by 'always'?"

"Why whether he marries Julia or not."

"Things aren't so easy," Lady Agnes judged. "It will all depend on
Nick's behaviour. He can stop it to-morrow."

Grace Dormer stared; she evidently thought Mr. Carteret's beneficence a
part of the scheme of nature. "How could he stop it?"

"By not being serious. It isn't so hard to prevent people giving you
money."

"Serious?" Grace repeated. "Does he want him to be a prig like Lord
Egbert?"

"Yes--that's exactly what he wants. And what he'll do for him he'll do
for him only if he marries Julia."

"Has he told you?" Grace inquired. And then, before her mother could
answer, "I'm delighted at that!" she cried.

"He hasn't told me, but that's the way things happen." Lady Agnes was
less optimistic than her daughter, and such optimism as she cultivated
was a thin tissue with the sense of things as they are showing through.
"If Nick becomes rich Charles Carteret will make him more so. If he
doesn't he won't give him a shilling."

"Oh mamma!" Grace demurred.

"It's all very well to say that in public life money isn't as necessary
as it used to be," her ladyship went on broodingly. "Those who say so
don't know anything about it. It's always intensely necessary."

Her daughter, visibly affected by the gloom of her manner, felt impelled
to evoke as a corrective a more cheerful idea. "I daresay; but there's
the fact--isn't there?--that poor papa had so little."

"Yes, and there's the fact that it killed him!"

These words came out with a strange, quick, little flare of passion.
They startled Grace Dormer, who jumped in her place and gasped, "Oh
mother!" The next instant, however, she added in a different voice, "Oh
Peter!" for, with an air of eagerness, a gentleman was walking up to
them.

"How d'ye do, Cousin Agnes? How d'ye do, little Grace?" Peter
Sherringham laughed and shook hands with them, and three minutes later
was settled in his chair at their table, on which the first elements of
the meal had been placed. Explanations, on one side and the other, were
demanded and produced; from which it appeared that the two parties had
been in some degree at cross-purposes. The day before Lady Agnes and her
companions travelled to Paris Sherringham had gone to London for
forty-eight hours on private business of the ambassador's, arriving, on
his return by the night-train, only early that morning. There had
accordingly been a delay in his receiving Nick Dormer's two notes. If
Nick had come to the embassy in person--he might have done him the
honour to call--he would have learned that the second secretary was
absent. Lady Agnes was not altogether successful in assigning a motive
to her son's neglect of this courteous form; she could but say: "I
expected him, I wanted him to go; and indeed, not hearing from you, he
would have gone immediately--an hour or two hence, on leaving this
place. But we're here so quietly--not to go out, not to seem to appeal
to the ambassador. Nick put it so--'Oh mother, we'll keep out of it; a
friendly note will do.' I don't know definitely what he wanted to keep
out of, unless anything like gaiety. The embassy isn't gay, I know. But
I'm sure his note was friendly, wasn't it? I daresay you'll see for
yourself. He's different directly he gets abroad; he doesn't seem to
care." Lady Agnes paused a moment, not carrying out this particular
elucidation; then she resumed: "He said you'd have seen Julia and that
you'd understand everything from her. And when I asked how she'd know he
said, 'Oh she knows everything!'"

"He never said a word to me about Julia," Peter Sherringham returned.
Lady Agnes and her daughter exchanged a glance at this: the latter had
already asked three times where Julia was, and her ladyship dropped that
they had been hoping she would be able to come with Peter. The young man
set forth that she was at the moment at an hotel in the Rue de la Paix,
but had only been there since that morning; he had seen her before
proceeding to the Champs Elysees. She had come up to Paris by an early
train--- she had been staying at Versailles, of all places in the world.
She had been a week in Paris on her return from Cannes--her stay there
had been of nearly a month: fancy!--and then had gone out to Versailles
to see Mrs. Billinghurst. Perhaps they'd remember her, poor Dallow's
sister. She was staying there to teach her daughters French--she had a
dozen or two!--and Julia had spent three days with her. She was to
return to England about the twenty-fifth. It would make seven weeks she
must have been away from town--a rare thing for her; she usually stuck
to it so in summer.

"Three days with Mrs. Billinghurst--how very good-natured of her!" Lady
Agnes commented.

"Oh they're very nice to her," Sherringham said.

"Well, I hope so!" Grace Dormer exhaled. "Why didn't you make her come
here?"

"I proposed it, but she wouldn't." Another eye-beam, at this, passed
between the two ladies and Peter went on: "She said you must come and
see her at the Hotel de Hollande."

"Of course we'll do that," Lady Agnes declared. "Nick went to ask about
her at the Westminster."

"She gave that up; they wouldn't give her the rooms she wanted, her
usual set."

"She's delightfully particular!" Grace said complacently. Then she
added: "She _does_ like pictures, doesn't she?"

Peter Sherringham stared. "Oh I daresay. But that's not what she has in
her head this morning. She has some news from London--she's immensely
excited."

"What has she in her head?" Lady Agnes asked.

"What's her news from London?" Grace added.

"She wants Nick to stand."

"Nick to stand?" both ladies cried.

"She undertakes to bring him in for Harsh. Mr. Pinks is dead--the
fellow, you know, who got the seat at the general election. He dropped
down in London--disease of the heart or something of that sort. Julia
has her telegram, but I see it was in last night's papers."

"Imagine--Nick never mentioned it!" said Lady Agnes.

"Don't you know, mother?--abroad he only reads foreign papers."

"Oh I know. I've no patience with him," her ladyship continued. "Dear
Julia!"

"It's a nasty little place, and Pinks had a tight squeeze--107 or
something of that sort; but if it returned a Liberal a year ago very
likely it will do so again. Julia at any rate believes it can be made
to--if the man's Nick--and is ready to take the order to put him in."

"I'm sure if she can do it she will," Grace pronounced.

"Dear, dear Julia! And Nick can do something for himself," said the
mother of this candidate.

"I've no doubt he can do anything," Peter Sherringham returned
good-naturedly. Then, "Do you mean in expenses?" he inquired.

"Ah I'm afraid he can't do much in expenses, poor dear boy! And it's
dreadful how little we can look to Percy."

"Well, I daresay you may look to Julia. I think that's her idea."

"Delightful Julia!" Lady Agnes broke out. "If poor Sir Nicholas could
have known! Of course he must go straight home," she added.

"He won't like that," said Grace.

"Then he'll have to go without liking it."

"It will rather spoil _your_ little excursion, if you've only just
come," Peter suggested; "to say nothing of the great Biddy's, if she's
enjoying Paris."

"We may stay perhaps--with Julia to protect us," said Lady Agnes.

"Ah she won't stay; she'll go over for her man."

"Her man----?"

"The fellow who stands, whoever he is--especially if he's Nick." These
last words caused the eyes of Peter Sherringham's companions to meet
again, and he went on: "She'll go straight down to Harsh."

"Wonderful Julia!" Lady Agnes panted. "Of course Nick must go straight
there too."

"Well, I suppose he must see first if they'll have him."

"If they'll have him? Why how can he tell till he tries?"

"I mean the people at headquarters, the fellows who arrange it."

Lady Agnes coloured a little. "My dear Peter, do you suppose there will
be the least doubt of their 'having' the son of his father?"

"Of course it's a great name, Cousin Agnes--a very great name."

"One of the greatest, simply," Lady Agnes smiled.

"It's the best name in the world!" said Grace more emphatically.

"All the same it didn't prevent his losing his seat."

"By half-a-dozen votes: it was too odious!" her ladyship cried.

"I remember--I remember. And in such a case as that why didn't they
immediately put him in somewhere else?"

"How one sees you live abroad, dear Peter! There happens to have been
the most extraordinary lack of openings--I never saw anything like
it--for a year. They've had their hand on him, keeping him all ready. I
daresay they've telegraphed him."

"And he hasn't told you?"

Lady Agnes faltered. "He's so very odd when he's abroad!"

"At home too he lets things go," Grace interposed. "He does so
little--takes no trouble." Her mother suffered this statement to pass
unchallenged, and she pursued philosophically: "I suppose it's because
he knows he's so clever."

"So he is, dear old man. But what does he do, what has he been doing, in
a positive way?"

"He has been painting."

"Ah not seriously!" Lady Agnes protested.

"That's the worst way," said Peter Sherringham. "Good things?"

Neither of the ladies made a direct response to this, but Lady Agnes
said: "He has spoken repeatedly. They're always calling on him."

"He speaks magnificently," Grace attested.

"That's another of the things I lose, living in far countries. And he's
doing the Salon now with the great Biddy?"

"Just the things in this part. I can't think what keeps them so long,"
Lady Agnes groaned. "Did you ever see such a dreadful place?"

Sherringham stared. "Aren't the things good? I had an idea----!"

"Good?" cried Lady Agnes. "They're too odious, too wicked."

"Ah," laughed Peter, "that's what people fall into if they live abroad.
The French oughtn't to live abroad!"

"Here they come," Grace announced at this point; "but they've got a
strange man with them."

"That's a bore when we want to talk!" Lady Agnes sighed.

Peter got up in the spirit of welcome and stood a moment watching the
others approach. "There will be no difficulty in talking, to judge by
the gentleman," he dropped; and while he remains so conspicuous our eyes
may briefly rest on him. He was middling high and was visibly a
representative of the nervous rather than of the phlegmatic branch of
his race. He had an oval face, fine firm features, and a complexion that
tended to the brown. Brown were his eyes, and women thought them soft;
dark brown his hair, in which the same critics sometimes regretted the
absence of a little undulation. It was perhaps to conceal this plainness
that he wore it very short. His teeth were white, his moustache was
pointed, and so was the small beard that adorned the extremity of his
chin. His face expressed intelligence and was very much alive; it had
the further distinction that it often struck superficial observers with
a certain foreignness of cast. The deeper sort, however, usually felt it
latently English enough. There was an idea that, having taken up the
diplomatic career and gone to live in strange lands, he cultivated the
mask of an alien, an Italian or a Spaniard; of an alien in time
even--one of the wonderful ubiquitous diplomatic agents of the sixteenth
century. In fact, none the less, it would have been impossible to be
more modern than Peter Sherringham--more of one's class and one's
country. But this didn't prevent several stray persons--Bridget Dormer
for instance--from admiring the hue of his cheek for its olive richness
and his moustache and beard for their resemblance to those of Charles I.
At the same time--she rather jumbled her comparisons--she thought he
recalled a Titian.




IV


Peter's meeting with Nick was of the friendliest on both sides,
involving a great many "dear fellows" and "old boys," and his salutation
to the younger of the Miss Dormers consisted of the frankest "Delighted
to see you, my dear Bid!" There was no kissing, but there was cousinship
in the air, of a conscious, living kind, as Gabriel Nash doubtless
quickly noted, hovering for a moment outside the group. Biddy said
nothing to Peter Sherringham, but there was no flatness in a silence
which heaved, as it were, with the fairest physiognomic portents. Nick
introduced Gabriel Nash to his mother and to the other two as "a
delightful old friend" whom he had just come across, and Sherringham
acknowledged the act by saying to Mr. Nash, but as if rather less for
his sake than for that of the presenter: "I've seen you very often
before."

"Ah repetition--recurrence: we haven't yet, in the study of how to live,
abolished that clumsiness, have we?" Mr. Nash genially inquired. "It's a
poverty in the supernumeraries of our stage that we don't pass once for
all, but come round and cross again like a procession or an army at the
theatre. It's a sordid economy that ought to have been managed better.
The right thing would be just _one_ appearance, and the procession,
regardless of expense, for ever and for ever different." The company was
occupied in placing itself at table, so that the only disengaged
attention for the moment was Grace's, to whom, as her eyes rested on
him, the young man addressed these last words with a smile. "Alas, it's
a very shabby idea, isn't it? The world isn't got up regardless of
expense!"

Grace looked quickly away from him and said to her brother: "Nick, Mr.
Pinks is dead."

"Mr. Pinks?" asked Gabriel Nash, appearing to wonder where he should
sit.

"The member for Harsh; and Julia wants you to stand," the girl went on.

"Mr. Pinks, the member for Harsh? What names to be sure!" Gabriel mused
cheerfully, still unseated.

"Julia wants me? I'm much obliged to her!" Nick absently said. "Nash,
please sit by my mother, with Peter on her other side."

"My dear, it isn't Julia"--Lady Agnes spoke earnestly. "Every one wants
you. Haven't you heard from your people? Didn't you know the seat was
vacant?"

Nick was looking round the table to see what was on it. "Upon my word I
don't remember. What else have you ordered, mother?"

"There's some _boeuf braise_, my dear, and afterwards some galantine.
Here's a dish of eggs with asparagus-tips."

"I advise you to go in for it, Nick," said Peter Sherringham, to whom
the preparation in question was presented.

"Into the eggs with asparagus-tips? _Donnez m'en s'il vous plait_. My
dear fellow, how can I stand? how can I sit? Where's the money to come
from?"

"The money? Why from Jul----!" Grace began, but immediately caught her
mother's eye.

"Poor Julia, how you do work her!" Nick exclaimed. "Nash, I recommend
you the asparagus-tips. Mother, he's my best friend--do look after him."

"I've an impression I've breakfasted--I'm not sure," Nash smiled.

"With those beautiful ladies? Try again--you'll find out."

"The money can be managed; the expenses are very small and the seat's
certain," Lady Agnes pursued, not apparently heeding her son's
injunction in respect to Nash.

"Rather--if Julia goes down!" her elder daughter exclaimed.

"Perhaps Julia won't go down!" Nick answered humorously.

Biddy was seated next to Mr. Nash, so that she could take occasion to
ask, "Who are the beautiful ladies?" as if she failed to recognise her
brother's allusion. In reality this was an innocent trick: she was more
curious than she could have given a suitable reason for about the odd
women from whom her neighbour had lately separated.

"Deluded, misguided, infatuated persons!" Mr. Nash replied,
understanding that she had asked for a description. "Strange eccentric,
almost romantic, types. Predestined victims, simple-minded sacrificial
lambs!"

This was copious, yet it was vague, so that Biddy could only respond:
"Oh all that?" But meanwhile Peter Sherringham said to Nick: "Julia's
here, you know. You must go and see her."

Nick looked at him an instant rather hard, as if to say: "You too?" But
Peter's eyes appeared to answer, "No, no, not I"; upon which his cousin
rejoined: "Of course I'll go and see her. I'll go immediately. Please to
thank her for thinking of me."

"Thinking of you? There are plenty to think of you!" Lady Agnes said.
"There are sure to be telegrams at home. We must go back--we must go
back!"

"We must go back to England?" Nick Dormer asked; and as his mother made
no answer he continued: "Do you mean I must go to Harsh?"

Her ladyship evaded this question, inquiring of Mr. Nash if he would
have a morsel of fish; but her gain was small, for this gentleman,
struck again by the unhappy name of the bereaved constituency, only
broke out: "Ah what a place to represent! How can you--how can you?"

"It's an excellent place," said Lady Agnes coldly. "I imagine you've
never been there. It's a very good place indeed. It belongs very largely
to my cousin, Mrs. Dallow."

Gabriel partook of the fish, listening with interest. "But I thought we
had no more pocket-boroughs."

"It's pockets we rather lack, so many of us. There are plenty of
Harshes," Nick Dormer observed.

"I don't know what you mean," Lady Agnes said to Nash with considerable
majesty.

Peter Sherringham also addressed him with an "Oh it's all right; they
come down on you like a shot!" and the young man continued ingenuously:

"Do you mean to say you've to pay money to get into that awful
place--that it's not _you_ who are paid?"

"Into that awful place?" Lady Agnes repeated blankly.

"Into the House of Commons. That you don't get a high salary?"

"My dear Nash, you're delightful: don't leave me--don't leave me!" Nick
cried; while his mother looked at him with an eye that demanded: "Who in
the world's this extraordinary person?"

"What then did you think pocket-boroughs were?" Peter Sherringham asked.

Mr. Nash's facial radiance rested on him. "Why, boroughs that filled
your pocket. To do that sort of thing without a bribe--_c'est trop
fort!_"

"He lives at Samarcand," Nick Dormer explained to his mother, who
flushed perceptibly. "What do you advise me? I'll do whatever you say,"
he went on to his old acquaintance.

"My dear, my dear----!" Lady Agnes pleaded.

"See Julia first, with all respect to Mr. Nash. She's of excellent
counsel," said Peter Sherringham.

Mr. Nash smiled across the table at his host. "The lady first--the lady
first! I've not a word to suggest as against any idea of hers."

"We mustn't sit here too long, there'll be so much to do," said Lady
Agnes anxiously, perceiving a certain slowness in the service of the
_boeuf braise_.

Biddy had been up to this moment mainly occupied in looking, covertly
and in snatches, at Peter Sherringham; as was perfectly lawful in a
young lady with a handsome cousin whom she had not seen for more than a
year. But her sweet voice now took license to throw in the words: "We
know what Mr. Nash thinks of politics: he told us just now he thinks
them dreadful."

"No, not dreadful--only inferior," the personage impugned protested.
"Everything's relative."

"Inferior to what?" Lady Agnes demanded.

Mr. Nash appeared to consider a moment. "To anything else that may be in
question."

"Nothing else is in question!" said her ladyship in a tone that would
have been triumphant if it had not been so dry.

"Ah then!" And her neighbour shook his head sadly. He turned after this
to Biddy. "The ladies whom I was with just now and in whom you were so
good as to express an interest?" Biddy gave a sign of assent and he went
on: "They're persons theatrical. The younger one's trying to go upon the
stage."

"And are you assisting her?" Biddy inquired, pleased she had guessed so
nearly right.

"Not in the least--I'm rather choking her off. I consider it the lowest
of the arts."

"Lower than politics?" asked Peter Sherringham, who was listening to
this.

"Dear no, I won't say that. I think the Theatre Francais a greater
institution than the House of Commons."

"I agree with you there!" laughed Sherringham; "all the more that I
don't consider the dramatic art a low one. It seems to me on the
contrary to include all the others."

"Yes--that's a view. I think it's the view of my friends."

"Of your friends?"

"Two ladies--old acquaintances--whom I met in Paris a week ago and whom
I've just been spending an hour with in this place."

"You should have seen them; they struck me very much," Biddy said to her
cousin.

"I should like to see them if they really have anything to say to the
theatre."

"It can easily be managed. Do you believe in the theatre?" asked Gabriel
Nash.

"Passionately," Sherringham confessed. "Don't you?"

Before Nash had had time to answer Biddy had interposed with a sigh.
"How I wish I could go--but in Paris I can't!"

"I'll take you, Biddy--I vow I'll take you."

"But the plays, Peter," the girl objected. "Mamma says they're worse
than the pictures."

"Oh, we'll arrange that: they shall do one at the Francais on purpose
for a delightful little yearning English girl."

"Can you make them?"

"I can make them do anything I choose."

"Ah then it's the theatre that believes in _you_," said Mr. Nash.

"It would be ungrateful if it didn't after all I've done for it!"
Sherringham gaily opined.

Lady Agnes had withdrawn herself from between him and her other guest
and, to signify that she at least had finished eating, had gone to sit
by her son, whom she held, with some importunity, in conversation. But
hearing the theatre talked of she threw across an impersonal challenge
to the paradoxical young man. "Pray should you think it better for a
gentleman to be an actor?"

"Better than being a politician? Ah, comedian for comedian, isn't the
actor more honest?"

Lady Agnes turned to her son and brought forth with spirit: "Think of
your great father, Nicholas!"

"He was an honest man," said Nicholas. "That's perhaps why he couldn't
stand it."

Peter Sherringham judged the colloquy to have taken an uncomfortable
twist, though not wholly, as it seemed to him, by the act of Nick's
queer comrade. To draw it back to safer ground he said to this
personage: "May I ask if the ladies you just spoke of are English--Mrs.
and Miss Rooth: isn't that the rather odd name?"

"The very same. Only the daughter, according to her kind, desires to be
known by some _nom de guerre_ before she has even been able to enlist."

"And what does she call herself?" Bridget Dormer asked.

"Maud Vavasour, or Edith Temple, or Gladys Vane--some rubbish of that
sort."

"What then is her own name?"

"Miriam--Miriam Rooth. It would do very well and would give her the
benefit of the prepossessing fact that--to the best of my belief at
least--she's more than half a Jewess."

"It is as good as Rachel Felix," Sherringham said.

"The name's as good, but not the talent. The girl's splendidly stupid."

"And more than half a Jewess? Don't you believe it!" Sherringham
laughed.

"Don't believe she's a Jewess?" Biddy asked, still more interested in
Miriam Rooth.

"No, no--that she's stupid, really. If she is she'll be the first."

"Ah you may judge for yourself," Nash rejoined, "if you'll come
to-morrow afternoon to Madame Carre, Rue de Constantinople, _a
l'entresol_."

"Madame Carre? Why, I've already a note from her--I found it this
morning on my return to Paris--asking me to look in at five o'clock and
listen to a _jeune Anglaise_."

"That's my arrangement--I obtained the favour. The ladies want an
opinion, and dear old Carre has consented to see them and to give one.
Maud Vavasour will recite, and the venerable artist will pass
judgement."

Sherringham remembered he had his note in his pocket and took it out to
look it over. "She wishes to make her a little audience--she says she'll
do better with that--and she asks me because I'm English. I shall make a
point of going."

"And bring Dormer if you can: the audience will be better. Will you
come, Dormer?" Mr. Nash continued, appealing to his friend--"will you
come with me to hear an English amateur recite and an old French actress
pitch into her?"

Nick looked round from his talk with his mother and Grace. "I'll go
anywhere with you so that, as I've told you, I mayn't lose sight of
you--may keep hold of you."

"Poor Mr. Nash, why is he so useful?" Lady Agnes took a cold freedom to
inquire.

"He steadies me, mother."

"Oh I wish you'd take _me_, Peter," Biddy broke out wistfully to her
cousin.

"To spend an hour with an old French actress? Do _you_ want to go upon
the stage?" the young man asked.

"No, but I want to see something--to know something."

"Madame Carre's wonderful in her way, but she's hardly company for a
little English girl."

"I'm not little, I'm only too big; and _she_ goes, the person you speak
of."

"For a professional purpose and with her good mother," smiled Mr. Nash.
"I think Lady Agnes would hardly venture----!"

"Oh I've seen her good mother!" said Biddy as if she had her impression
of what the worth of that protection might be.

"Yes, but you haven't heard her. It's then that you measure her."

Biddy was wistful still. "Is it the famous Honorine Carre, the great
celebrity?"

"Honorine in person: the incomparable, the perfect!" said Peter
Sherringham. "The first artist of our time, taking her altogether. She
and I are old pals; she has been so good as to come and 'say'
things--which she does sometimes still _dans le monde_ as no one else
_can_--- in my rooms."

"Make her come then. We can go _there_!"

"One of these days!"

"And the young lady--Miriam, Maud, Gladys--make her come too."

Sherringham looked at Nash and the latter was bland. "Oh you'll have no
difficulty. She'll jump at it!"

"Very good. I'll give a little artistic tea--with Julia too of course.
And you must come, Mr. Nash." This gentleman promised with an
inclination, and Peter continued: "But if, as you say, you're not for
helping the young lady, how came you to arrange this interview with the
great model?"

"Precisely to stop her short. The great model will find her very bad.
Her judgements, as you probably know, are Rhadamanthine."

"Unfortunate creature!" said Biddy. "I think you're cruel."

"Never mind--I'll look after them," Sherringham laughed.

"And how can Madame Carre judge if the girl recites English?"

"She's so intelligent that she could judge if she recited Chinese,"
Peter declared.

"That's true, but the _jeune Anglaise_ recites also in French," said
Gabriel Nash.

"Then she isn't stupid."

"And in Italian, and in several more tongues, for aught I know."

Sherringham was visibly interested. "Very good--we'll put her through
them all."

"She must be _most_ clever," Biddy went on yearningly.

"She has spent her life on the Continent; she has wandered about with
her mother; she has picked up things."

"And is she a lady?" Biddy asked.

"Oh tremendous! The great ones of the earth on the mother's side. On the
father's, on the other hand, I imagine, only a Jew stockbroker in the
City."

"Then they're rich--or ought to be," Sherringham suggested.

"Ought to be--ah there's the bitterness! The stockbroker had too short a
go--he was carried off in his flower. However, he left his wife a
certain property, which she appears to have muddled away, not having the
safeguard of being herself a Hebrew. This is what she has lived on till
to-day--this and another resource. Her husband, as she has often told
me, had the artistic temperament: that's common, as you know, among _ces
messieurs_. He made the most of his little opportunities and collected
various pictures, tapestries, enamels, porcelains, and similar gewgaws.
He parted with them also, I gather, at a profit; in short he carried on
a neat little business as a _brocanteur_. It was nipped in the bud, but
Mrs. Rooth was left with a certain number of these articles in her
hands; indeed they must have formed her only capital. She was not a
woman of business; she turned them, no doubt, to indifferent account;
but she sold them piece by piece, and they kept her going while her
daughter grew up. It was to this precarious traffic, conducted with
extraordinary mystery and delicacy, that, five years ago, in Florence, I
was indebted for my acquaintance with her. In those days I used to
collect--heaven help me!--I used to pick up rubbish which I could ill
afford. It was a little phase--we have our little phases, haven't we?"
Mr. Nash asked with childlike trust--"and I've come out on the other
side. Mrs. Rooth had an old green pot and I heard of her old green pot.
To hear of it was to long for it, so that I went to see it under cover
of night. I bought it and a couple of years ago I overturned and smashed
it. It was the last of the little phase. It was not, however, as you've
seen, the last of Mrs. Rooth. I met her afterwards in London, and I
found her a year or two ago in Venice. She appears to be a great
wanderer. She had other old pots, of other colours, red, yellow, black,
or blue--she could produce them of any complexion you liked. I don't
know whether she carried them about with her or whether she had little
secret stores in the principal cities of Europe. To-day at any rate they
seem all gone. On the other hand she has her daughter, who has grown up
and who's a precious vase of another kind--less fragile I hope than the
rest. May she not be overturned and smashed!"

Peter Sherringham and Biddy Dormer listened with attention to this
history, and the girl testified to the interest with which she had
followed it by saying when Mr. Nash had ceased speaking: "A Jewish
stockbroker, a dealer in curiosities: what an odd person to marry--for a
person who was well born! I daresay he was a German."

"His name must have been simply Roth, and the poor lady, to smarten it
up, has put in another _o_," Sherringham ingeniously suggested.

"You're both very clever," said Gabriel, "and Rudolf Roth, as I happen
to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour's papa. But so far
as the question of derogation goes one might as well drown as
starve--for what connexion is _not_ a misalliance when one happens to
have the unaccommodating, the crushing honour of being a Neville-Nugent
of Castle Nugent? That's the high lineage of Maud's mamma. I seem to
have heard it mentioned that Rudolf Roth was very versatile and, like
most of his species, not unacquainted with the practice of music. He had
been employed to teach the harmonium to Miss Neville-Nugent and she had
profited by his lessons. If his daughter's like him--and she's not like
her mother--he was darkly and dangerously handsome. So I venture rapidly
to reconstruct the situation."

A silence, for the moment, had fallen on Lady Agnes and her other two
children, so that Mr. Nash, with his universal urbanity, practically
addressed these last remarks to them as well as to his other auditors.
Lady Agnes looked as if she wondered whom he was talking about, and
having caught the name of a noble residence she inquired: "Castle
Nugent--where in the world's that?"

"It's a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable
splendour, but I fear not to be found in any prosaic earthly geography!"
Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth as if she weren't sure a
liberty had not been taken with her, or at least with her "order," and
while Mr. Nash continued to abound in descriptive suppositions--"It must
be on the banks of the Manzanares or the Guadalquivir"--Peter
Sherringham, whose imagination had seemingly been kindled by the sketch
of Miriam Rooth, took up the argument and reminded him that he had a
short time before assigned a low place to the dramatic art and had not
yet answered the question as to whether he believed in the theatre.
Which gave the speaker a further chance. "I don't know that I understand
your question; there are different ways of taking it. Do I think it's
important? Is that what you mean? Important certainly to managers and
stage-carpenters who want to make money, to ladies and gentlemen who
want to produce themselves in public by limelight, and to other ladies
and gentlemen who are bored and stupid and don't know what to do with
their evening. It's a commercial and social convenience which may be
infinitely worked. But important artistically, intellectually? How _can_
it be--so poor, so limited a form?"

"Upon my honour it strikes me as rich and various! Do _you_ think it's a
poor and limited form, Nick?" Sherringham added, appealing to his
kinsman.

"I think whatever Nash thinks. I've no opinion to-day but his."

This answer of the hope of the Dormers drew the eyes of his mother and
sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he wasn't used to
such responsibilities--so few people had ever tested his presence of
mind by agreeing with him. "Oh I used to be of your way of feeling,"
Nash went on to Sherringham. "I understand you perfectly. It's a phase
like another. I've been through it--_j'ai ete comme ca._"

"And you went then very often to the Theatre Francais, and it was there
I saw you. I place you now."

"I'm afraid I noticed none of the other spectators," Nash explained. "I
had no attention but for the great Carre--she was still on the stage.
Judge of my infatuation, and how I can allow for yours, when I tell you
that I sought her acquaintance, that I couldn't rest till I had told her
how I hung upon her lips."

"That's just what _I_ told her," Sherringham returned.

"She was very kind to me. She said: '_Vous me rendez des forces_.'"

"That's just what she said to me!"

"And we've remained very good friends."

"So have we!" laughed Sherringham. "And such perfect art as hers--do you
mean to say you don't consider _that_ important, such a rare dramatic
intelligence?"

"I'm afraid you read the _feuilletons_. You catch their phrases"--Nash
spoke with pity. "Dramatic intelligence is never rare; nothing's more
common."

"Then why have we so many shocking actors?"

"Have we? I thought they were mostly good; succeeding more easily and
more completely in that business than in anything else. What could they
do--those people generally--if they didn't do that poor thing? And
reflect that the poor thing enables them to succeed! Of course, always,
there are numbers of people on the stage who are no actors at all, for
it's even easier to our poor humanity to be ineffectively stupid and
vulgar than to bring down the house."

"It's not easy, by what I can see, to produce, completely, any artistic
effect," Sherringham declared; "and those the actor produces are among
the most momentous we know. You'll not persuade me that to watch such an
actress as Madame Carre wasn't an education of the taste, an enlargement
of one's knowledge."

"She did what she could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coarsening
conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character
in a play--not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of
modern pieces--is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The
dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is
restricted to so poor an analysis."

"I know the complaint. It's all the fashion now. The _raffines_ despise
the theatre," said Peter Sherringham in the manner of a man abreast with
the culture of his age and not to be captured by a surprise. "_Connu,
connu_!"

"It will be known better yet, won't it? when the essentially brutal
nature of the modern audience is still more perceived, when it has been
properly analysed: the _omnium gatherum_ of the population of a big
commercial city at the hour of the day when their taste is at its
lowest, flocking out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with
food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid
preoccupations of the age, squeezed together in a sweltering mass,
disappointed in their seats, timing the author, timing the actor,
wishing to get their money back on the spot--all before eleven o'clock.
Fancy putting the exquisite before such a tribunal as that! There's not
even a question of it. The dramatist wouldn't if he could, and in nine
cases out of ten he couldn't if he would. He has to make the basest
concessions. One of his principal canons is that he must enable his
spectators to catch the suburban trains, which stop at 11.30. What would
you think of any other artist--the painter or the novelist--whose
governing forces should be the dinner and the suburban trains? The old
dramatists didn't defer to them--not so much at least--and that's why
they're less and less actable. If they're touched--the large loose
men--it's only to be mutilated and trivialised. Besides, they had a
simpler civilisation to represent--societies in which the life of man
was in action, in passion, in immediate and violent expression. Those
things could be put upon the playhouse boards with comparatively little
sacrifice of their completeness and their truth. To-day we're so
infinitely more reflective and complicated and diffuse that it makes all
the difference. What can you do with a character, with an idea, with a
feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains? You can give a gross,
rough sketch of them, but how little you touch them, how bald you leave
them! What crudity compared with what the novelist does!"

"Do you write novels, Mr. Nash?" Peter candidly asked.

"No, but I read them when they're extraordinarily good, and I don't go
to plays. I read Balzac for instance--I encounter the admirable portrait
of Valerie Marneffe in _La Cousine Bette_."

"And you contrast it with the poverty of Emile Augier's Seraphine in
_Les Lionnes Pauvres_? I was awaiting you there. That's the _cheval de
bataille_ of you fellows."

"What an extraordinary discussion! What dreadful authors!" Lady Agnes
murmured to her son. But he was listening so attentively to the other
young men that he made no response, and Peter Sherringham went on:

"I've seen Madame Carre in things of the modern repertory, which she has
made as vivid to me, caused to abide as ineffaceably in my memory, as
Valerie Marneffe. She's the Balzac, as one may say, of actresses."

"The miniaturist, as it were, of whitewashers!" Nash offered as a
substitute.

It might have been guessed that Sherringham resented his damned freedom,
yet could but emulate his easy form. "You'd be magnanimous if you
thought the young lady you've introduced to our old friend would be
important."

Mr. Nash lightly weighed it. "She might be much more so than she ever
will be."

Lady Agnes, however, got up to terminate the scene and even to signify
that enough had been said about people and questions she had never so
much as heard of. Every one else rose, the waiter brought Nicholas the
receipt of the bill, and Sherringham went on, to his interlocutor:
"Perhaps she'll be more so than you think."

"Perhaps--if you take an interest in her!"

"A mystic voice seems to exhort me to do so, to whisper that though I've
never seen her I shall find something in her." On which Peter appealed.
"What do you say, Biddy--shall I take an interest in her?"

The girl faltered, coloured a little, felt a certain embarrassment in
being publicly treated as an oracle. "If she's not nice I don't advise
it."

"And if she _is_ nice?"

"You advise it still less!" her brother exclaimed, laughing and putting
his arm round her.

Lady Agnes looked sombre--she might have been saying to herself: "Heaven
help us, what chance has a girl of mine with a man who's so agog about
actresses?" She was disconcerted and distressed; a multitude of
incongruous things, all the morning, had been forced upon her
attention--displeasing pictures and still more displeasing theories
about them, vague portents of perversity on Nick's part and a strange
eagerness on Peter's, learned apparently in Paris, to discuss, with a
person who had a tone she never had been exposed to, topics irrelevant
and uninteresting, almost disgusting, the practical effect of which was
to make light of her presence. "Let us leave this--let us leave this!"
she grimly said. The party moved together toward the door of departure,
and her ruffled spirit was not soothed by hearing her son remark to his
terrible friend: "You know you don't escape me; I stick to you!"

At this Lady Agnes broke out and interposed. "Pardon my reminding you
that you're going to call on Julia."

"Well, can't Nash also come to call on Julia? That's just what I
want--that she should see him."

Peter Sherringham came humanely to his kinswoman's assistance. "A better
way perhaps will be for them to meet under my auspices at my 'dramatic
tea.' This will enable me to return one favour for another. If Mr. Nash
is so good as to introduce me to this aspirant for honours we estimate
so differently, I'll introduce him to my sister, a much more positive
quantity."

"It's easy to see who'll have the best of it!" Grace Dormer declared;
while Nash stood there serenely, impartially, in a graceful detached way
which seemed characteristic of him, assenting to any decision that
relieved him of the grossness of choice and generally confident that
things would turn out well for him. He was cheerfully helpless and
sociably indifferent; ready to preside with a smile even at a
discussion of his own admissibility.

"Nick will bring you. I've a little corner at the embassy," Sherringham
continued.

"You're very kind. You must bring _him_ then to-morrow--Rue de
Constantinople."

"At five o'clock--don't be afraid."

"Oh dear!" Biddy wailed as they went on again and Lady Agnes, seizing
his arm, marched off more quickly with her son. When they came out into
the Champs Elysees Nick Dormer, looking round, saw his friend had
disappeared. Biddy had attached herself to Peter, and Grace couldn't
have encouraged Mr. Nash.




V


Lady Agnes's idea had been that her son should go straight from the
Palais de l'Industrie to the Hotel de Hollande, with or without his
mother and his sisters as his humour should seem to recommend. Much as
she desired to see their valued Julia, and as she knew her daughters
desired it, she was quite ready to put off their visit if this sacrifice
should contribute to a speedy confrontation for Nick. She was anxious he
should talk with Mrs. Dallow, and anxious he should be anxious himself;
but it presently appeared that he was conscious of no pressure of
eagerness. His view was that she and the girls should go to their cousin
without delay and should, if they liked, spend the rest of the day in
her society. He would go later; he would go in the evening. There were
lots of things he wanted to do meanwhile.

This question was discussed with some intensity, though not at length,
while the little party stood on the edge of the Place de la Concorde, to
which they had proceeded on foot; and Lady Agnes noticed that the "lots
of things" to which he proposed to give precedence over an urgent duty,
a conference with a person who held out full hands to him, were implied
somehow in the friendly glance with which he covered the great square,
the opposite bank of the Seine, the steep blue roofs of the quay, the
bright immensity of Paris. What in the world could be more important
than making sure of his seat?--so quickly did the good lady's
imagination travel. And now that idea appealed to him less than a ramble
in search of old books and prints--since she was sure this was what he
had in his head. Julia would be flattered should she know it, but of
course she mustn't know it. Lady Agnes was already thinking of the least
injurious account she could give of the young man's want of
precipitation. She would have liked to represent him as tremendously
occupied, in his room at their own hotel, in getting off political
letters to every one it should concern, and particularly in drawing up
his address to the electors of Harsh. Fortunately she was a woman of
innumerable discretions, and a part of the worn look that sat in her
face came from her having schooled herself for years, in commerce with
her husband and her sons, not to insist unduly. She would have liked to
insist, nature had formed her to insist, and the self-control had told
in more ways than one. Even now it was powerless to prevent her
suggesting that before doing anything else Nick should at least repair
to the inn and see if there weren't some telegrams.

He freely consented to do as much as this, and, having called a cab that
she might go her way with the girls, kissed her again as he had done at
the exhibition. This was an attention that could never displease her,
but somehow when he kissed her she was really the more worried: she had
come to recognise it as a sign that he was slipping away from her, and
she wished she might frankly take it as his clutch at her to save him.
She drove off with a vague sense that at any rate she and the girls
might do something toward keeping the place warm for him. She had been a
little vexed that Peter had not administered more of a push toward the
Hotel de Hollande, clear as it had become to her now that there was a
foreignness in Peter which was not to be counted on and which made him
speak of English affairs and even of English domestic politics as local
and even "funny." They were very grandly local, and if one recalled, in
public life, an occasional droll incident wasn't that, liberally viewed,
just the warm human comfort of them? As she left the two young men
standing together in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, the grand
composition of which Nick, as she looked back, appeared to have paused
to admire--as if he hadn't seen it a thousand times!--she wished she
might have thought of Peter's influence with her son as exerted a little
more in favour of localism. She had a fear he wouldn't abbreviate the
boy's ill-timed _flanerie_. However, he had been very nice: he had
invited them all to dine with him that evening at a convenient cafe,
promising to bring Julia and one of his colleagues. So much as this he
had been willing to do to make sure Nick and his sister should meet. His
want of localism, moreover, was not so great as that if it should turn
out that there _was_ anything beneath his manner toward Biddy--! The
upshot of this reflexion might have been represented by the circumstance
of her ladyship's remarking after a minute to her younger daughter, who
sat opposite her in the _voiture de place_, that it would do no harm if
she should get a new hat and that the search might be instituted that
afternoon.

"A French hat, mamma?" said Grace. "Oh do wait till she gets home!"

"I think they're really prettier here, you know," Biddy opined; and Lady
Agnes said simply: "I daresay they're cheaper." What was in her mind in
fact was: "I daresay Peter thinks them becoming." It will be seen she
had plenty of inward occupation, the sum of which was not lessened by
her learning when she reached the top of the Rue de la Paix that Mrs.
Dallow had gone out half an hour before and had left no message. She was
more disconcerted by this incident than she could have explained or than
she thought was right, as she had taken for granted Julia would be in a
manner waiting for them. How could she be sure Nick wasn't coming? When
people were in Paris a few days they didn't mope in the house, but she
might have waited a little longer or have left an explanation. Was she
then not so much in earnest about Nick's standing? Didn't she recognise
the importance of being there to see him about it? Lady Agnes wondered
if her behaviour were a sign of her being already tired of the way this
young gentleman treated her. Perhaps she had gone out because an
instinct told her that the great propriety of their meeting early would
make no difference with him--told her he wouldn't after all come. His
mother's heart sank as she glanced at this possibility that their
precious friend was already tired, she having on her side an intuition
that there were still harder things in store. She had disliked having to
tell Mrs. Dallow that Nick wouldn't see her till the evening, but now
she disliked still more her not being there to hear it. She even
resented a little her kinswoman's not having reasoned that she and the
girls would come in any event, and not thought them worth staying in
for. It came up indeed that she would perhaps have gone to their hotel,
which was a good way up the Rue de Rivoli, near the Palais Royal--on
which the cabman was directed to drive to that establishment.

As he jogged along she took in some degree the measure of what that
might mean, Julia's seeking a little to avoid them. Was she growing to
dislike them? Did she think they kept too sharp an eye on her, so that
the idea of their standing in a still closer relation wouldn't be
enticing? Her conduct up to this time had not worn such an appearance,
unless perhaps a little, just a very little, in the matter of her ways
with poor Grace. Lady Agnes knew she wasn't particularly fond of poor
Grace, and could even sufficiently guess the reason--the manner in which
Grace betrayed most how they wanted to make sure of her. She remembered
how long the girl had stayed the last time she had been at Harsh--going
for an acceptable week and dragging out her visit to a month. She took a
private heroic vow that Grace shouldn't go near the place again for a
year; not, that is, unless Nick and Julia were married within the time.
If that were to happen she shouldn't care. She recognised that it wasn't
absolutely everything Julia should be in love with Nick; it was also
better she should dislike his mother and sisters after a probable
pursuit of him than before. Lady Agnes did justice to the natural rule
in virtue of which it usually comes to pass that a woman doesn't get on
with her husband's female belongings, and was even willing to be
sacrificed to it in her disciplined degree. But she desired not to be
sacrificed for nothing: if she was to be objected to as a mother-in-law
she wished to be the mother-in-law first.

At the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli she had the disappointment of finding
that Mrs. Dallow had not called, and also that no telegrams had come.
She went in with the girls for half an hour and then straggled out with
them again. She was undetermined and dissatisfied and the afternoon was
rather a problem; of the kind, moreover, that she disliked most and was
least accustomed to: not a choice between different things to do--her
life had been full of that--but a want of anything to do at all. Nick
had said to her before they separated: "You can knock about with the
girls, you know; everything's amusing here." That was easily said while
he sauntered and gossiped with Peter Sherringham and perhaps went to
see more pictures like those in the Salon. He was usually, on such
occasions, very good-natured about spending his time with them; but this
episode had taken altogether a perverse, profane form. She had no desire
whatever to knock about and was far from finding everything in Paris
amusing. She had no aptitude for aimlessness, and moreover thought it
vulgar. If she had found Julia's card at the hotel--the sign of a hope
of catching them just as they came back from the Salon--she would have
made a second attempt to see her before the evening; but now certainly
they would leave her alone. Lady Agnes wandered joylessly with the girls
in the Palais Royal and the Rue de Richelieu, and emerged upon the
Boulevard, where they continued their frugal prowl, as Biddy rather
irritatingly called it. They went into five shops to buy a hat for
Biddy, and her ladyship's presumptions of cheapness were woefully
belied.

"Who in the world's your comic friend?" Peter Sherringham was meanwhile
asking of his kinsman as they walked together.

"Ah there's something else you lost by going to Cambridge--you lost
Gabriel Nash!"

"He sounds like an Elizabethan dramatist," Sherringham said. "But I
haven't lost him, since it appears now I shan't be able to have you
without him."

"Oh, as for that, wait a little. I'm going to try him again, but I don't
know how he wears. What I mean is that you've probably lost his
freshness, which was the great thing. I rather fear he's becoming
conventional, or at any rate serious."

"Bless me, do you call that serious?"

"He used to be so gay. He had a real genius for playing with ideas. He
was a wonderful talker."

"It seems to me he does very well now," said Peter Sherringham.

"Oh this is nothing. He had great flights of old, very great flights;
one saw him rise and rise and turn somersaults in the blue--one wondered
how far he could go. He's very intelligent, and I should think it might
be interesting to find out what it is that prevents the whole man from
being as good as his parts. I mean in case he isn't so good."

"I see you more than suspect that. Mayn't it be simply that he's too
great an ass?"

"That would be the whole--I shall see in time--but it certainly isn't
one of the parts. It may be the effect, but it isn't the cause, and it's
for the cause I claim an interest. Do you think him an ass for what he
said about the theatre--his pronouncing it a coarse art?"

"To differ from you about him that reason would do," said Sherringham.
"The only bad one would be one that shouldn't preserve our difference.
You needn't tell me you agree with him, for frankly I don't care."

"Then your passion still burns?" Nick Dormer asked.

"My passion--?"

"I don't mean for any individual exponent of the equivocal art: mark the
guilty conscience, mark the rising blush, mark the confusion of mind! I
mean the old sign one knew you best by; your permanent stall at the
Francais, your inveterate attendance at _premieres_, the way you
'follow' the young talents and the old."

"Yes, it's still my little hobby, my little folly if you like,"
Sherringham said. "I don't find I get tired of it. What will you have?
Strong predilections are rather a blessing; they're simplifying. I'm
fond of representation--the representation of life: I like it better, I
think, than the real thing. You like it too, you'd be ready in other
conditions to go in for it, in your way--so you've no right to cast the
stone. You like it best done by one vehicle and I by another; and our
preference on either side has a deep root in us. There's a fascination
to me in the way the actor does it, when his talent--ah he must have
that!--has been highly trained. Ah it must _be_ that! The things he can
do in this effort at representation, with the dramatist to back him,
seem to me innumerable--he can carry it to a point!--and I take great
pleasure in observing them, in recognising and comparing them. It's an
amusement like another--I don't pretend to call it by any exalted name,
but in this vale of friction it will serve. One can lose one's self in
it, and it has the recommendation--in common, I suppose, with the study
of the other arts--that the further you go in it the more you find. So I
go rather far, if you will. But is it the principal sign one knows me
by?" Peter abruptly asked.

"Don't be ashamed of it," Nick returned--"else it will be ashamed of
you. I ought to discriminate. You're distinguished among my friends and
relations by your character of rising young diplomatist; but you know I
always want the final touch to the picture, the last fruit of analysis.
Therefore I make out that you're conspicuous among rising young
diplomatists for the infatuation you describe in such pretty terms."

"You evidently believe it will prevent my ever rising very high. But
pastime for pastime is it any idler than yours?"

"Than mine?"

"Why you've half-a-dozen while I only allow myself the luxury of one.
For the theatre's my sole vice, really. Is this more wanton, say, than
to devote weeks to the consideration of the particular way in which your
friend Mr. Nash may be most intensely a twaddler and a bore? That's not
my ideal of choice recreation, but I'd undertake to satisfy you about
him sooner. You're a young statesman--who happens to be an _en
disponibilite_ for the moment--but you spend not a little of your time
in besmearing canvas with bright-coloured pigments. The idea of
representation fascinates you, but in your case it's representation in
oils--or do you practise water-colours and pastel too? You even go much
further than I, for I study my art of predilection only in the works of
others. I don't aspire to leave works of my own. You're a painter,
possibly a great one; but I'm not an actor." Nick Dormer declared he
would certainly become one--he was so well on the way to it; and
Sherringham, without heeding this charge, went on: "Let me add that,
considering you _are_ a painter, your portrait of the complicated Nash
is lamentably dim."

"He's not at all complicated; he's only too simple to give an account
of. Most people have a lot of attributes and appendages that dress them
up and superscribe them, and what I like Gabriel for is that he hasn't
any at all. It makes him, it keeps him, so refreshingly cool."

"By Jove, you match him there! Isn't it an appendage and an attribute to
escape kicking? How does he manage that?" Sherringham asked.

"I haven't the least idea--I don't know that he doesn't rouse the
kicking impulse. Besides, he can kick back and I don't think any one has
ever seen him duck or dodge. His means, his profession, his belongings
have never anything to do with the question. He doesn't shade off into
other people; he's as neat as an outline cut out of paper with scissors.
I like him, therefore, because in dealing with him you know what you've
got hold of. With most men you don't: to pick the flower you must break
off the whole dusty, thorny, worldly branch; you find you're taking up
in your grasp all sorts of other people and things, dangling accidents
and conditions. Poor Nash has none of those encumbrances: he's the
solitary-fragrant blossom."

"My dear fellow, you'd be better for a little of the same pruning!"
Sherringham retorted; and the young men continued their walk and their
gossip, jerking each other this way and that, punching each other here
and there, with an amicable roughness consequent on their having, been
boys together. Intimacy had reigned of old between the little
Sherringhams and the little Dormers, united in the country by ease of
neighbouring and by the fact that there was first cousinship, not
neglected, among the parents, Lady Agnes standing in this plastic
relation to Lady Windrush, the mother of Peter and Julia as well as of
other daughters and of a maturer youth who was to inherit, and who since
then had inherited, the ancient barony. Many things had altered later
on, but not the good reasons for not explaining. One of our young men
had gone to Eton and the other to Harrow--the scattered school on the
hill was the tradition of the Dormers--and the divergence had rather
taken its course in university years. Bricket, however, had remained
accessible to Windrush, and Windrush to Bricket, to which estate
Percival Dormer had now succeeded, terminating the interchange a trifle
rudely by letting out that pleasant white house in the midlands--its
expropriated inhabitants, Lady Agnes and her daughters, adored it--to an
American reputed rich, who in the first flush of his sense of contrasts
considered that for twelve hundred a year he got it at a bargain.
Bricket had come to the late Sir Nicholas from his elder brother, dying
wifeless and childless. The new baronet, so different from his
father--though recalling at some points the uncle after whom he had
been named--that Nick had to make it up by cultivating conformity,
roamed about the world, taking shots which excited the enthusiasm of
society, when society heard of them, at the few legitimate creatures of
the chase the British rifle had up to that time spared. Lady Agnes
meanwhile settled with her girls in a gabled, latticed house in a
mentionable quarter, though it still required a little explaining, of
the temperate zone of London. It was not into her lap, poor woman, that
the revenues of Bricket were poured. There was no dower-house attached
to that moderate property, and the allowance with which the estate was
charged on her ladyship's behalf was not an incitement to grandeur.

Nick had a room under his mother's roof, which he mainly used to dress
for dinner when dining in Calcutta Gardens, and he had "kept on" his
chambers in the Temple; for to a young man in public life an independent
address was indispensable. Moreover, he was suspected of having a studio
in an out-of-the-way district, the indistinguishable parts of South
Kensington, incongruous as such a retreat might seem in the case of a
member of Parliament. It was an absurd place to see his constituents
unless he wanted to paint their portraits, a kind of "representation"
with which they would scarce have been satisfied; and in fact the only
question of portraiture had been when the wives and daughters of several
of them expressed a wish for the picture of their handsome young member.
Nick had not offered to paint it himself, and the studio was taken for
granted rather than much looked into by the ladies in Calcutta Gardens.
Too express a disposition to regard whims of this sort as extravagance
pure and simple was known by them to be open to correction; for they
were not oblivious that Mr. Carteret had humours which weighed against
them in the shape of convenient cheques nestling between the inside
pages of legible letters of advice. Mr. Carteret was Nick's providence,
just as Nick was looked to, in a general way, to be that of his mother
and sisters, especially since it had become so plain that Percy, who was
not subtly selfish, would operate, mainly with a "six-bore," quite out
of that sphere. It was not for studios certainly that Mr. Carteret sent
cheques; but they were an expression of general confidence in Nick, and
a little expansion was natural to a young man enjoying such a luxury as
that. It was sufficiently felt in Calcutta Gardens that he could be
looked to not to betray such confidence; for Mr. Carteret's behaviour
could have no name at all unless one were prepared to call it
encouraging. He had never promised anything, but he was one of the
delightful persons with whom the redemption precedes or dispenses with
the vow. He had been an early and lifelong friend of the late right
honourable gentleman, a political follower, a devoted admirer, a stanch
supporter in difficult hours. He had never married, espousing nothing
more reproductive than Sir Nicholas's views--he used to write letters to
the _Times_ in favour of them--and had, so far as was known, neither
chick nor child; nothing but an amiable little family of eccentricities,
the flower of which was his odd taste for living in a small, steep,
clean country town, all green gardens and red walls with a girdle of
hedge-rows, all clustered about an immense brown old abbey. When Lady
Agnes's imagination rested upon the future of her second son she liked
to remember that Mr. Carteret had nothing to "keep up": the inference
seemed so direct that he would keep up Nick.

The most important event in the life of this young man had been
incomparably his success, under his father's eyes, more than two years
before, in the sharp contest for Crockhurst--a victory which his
consecrated name, his extreme youth, his ardour in the fray, the marked
personal sympathy of the party, and the attention excited by the fresh
cleverness of his speeches, tinted with young idealism and yet sticking
sufficiently to the question--the burning question which has since
burned out--had made quite splendid. There had been leaders in the
newspapers about it, half in compliment to her husband, who was known to
be failing so prematurely--he was almost as young to die, and to die
famous, for Lady Agnes regarded it as famous, as his son had been to
stand--tributes the boy's mother religiously preserved, cut out and tied
together with a ribbon, in the innermost drawer of a favourite cabinet.
But it had been a barren, or almost a barren triumph, for in the order
of importance in Nick's history another incident had run it, as the
phrase is, very close: nothing less than the quick dissolution of the
Parliament in which he was so manifestly destined to give symptoms of a
future. He had not recovered his seat at the general election, for the
second contest was even sharper than the first and the Tories had put
forward a loud, vulgar, rattling, bullying, money-spending man. It was
to a certain extent a comfort that poor Sir Nicholas, who had been
witness of the bright hour, should have passed away before the darkness.
He died with all his hopes on his second son's head, unconscious of near
disappointment, handing on the torch and the tradition, after a long,
supreme interview with Nick at which Lady Agnes had not been present,
but which she knew to have been a thorough paternal dedication, an
august communication of ideas on the highest national questions (she had
reason to believe he had touched on those of external as well as of
domestic and of colonial policy) leaving on the boy's nature and manner
from that moment the most unmistakable traces. If his tendency to
reverie increased it was because he had so much to think over in what
his pale father had said to him in the hushed dim chamber, laying on him
the great mission that death had cut short, breathing into him with
unforgettable solemnity the very accents--Sir Nicholas's voice had been
wonderful for richness--that he was to sound again. It was work cut out
for a lifetime, and that "co-ordinating power in relation to detail"
which was one of the great characteristics of the lamented statesman's
high distinction--the most analytic of the weekly papers was always
talking about it--had enabled him to rescue the prospect from any shade
of vagueness or of ambiguity.

Five years before Nick Dormer went up to be questioned by the electors
of Crockhurst Peter Sherringham had appeared before a board of examiners
who let him off much less easily, though there were also some flattering
prejudices in his favour; such influences being a part of the copious,
light, unembarrassing baggage with which each of the young men began
life. Peter passed, however, passed high, and had his reward in prompt
assignment to small, subordinate, diplomatic duties in Germany. Since
then he had had his professional adventures, which need not arrest us,
inasmuch as they had all paled in the light of his appointment, nearly
three years previous to the moment of our making his acquaintance, to a
secretaryship of embassy in Paris. He had done well and had gone fast
and for the present could draw his breath at ease. It pleased him better
to remain in Paris as a subordinate than to go to Honduras as a
principal, and Nick Dormer had not put a false colour on the matter in
speaking of his stall at the Theatre Francais as a sedative to his
ambition. Nick's inferiority in age to his cousin sat on him more
lightly than when they had been in their teens; and indeed no one can
very well be much older than a young man who has figured for a year,
however imperceptibly, in the House of Commons. Separation and diversity
had made them reciprocally strange enough to give a price to what they
shared; they were friends without being particular friends; that further
degree could always hang before them as a suitable but not oppressive
contingency, and they were both conscious that it was in their interest
to keep certain differences to "chaff" each other about--so possible was
it that they might have quarrelled if they had had everything in common.
Peter, as being wide-minded, was a little irritated to find his cousin
always so intensely British, while Nick Dormer made him the object of
the same compassionate criticism, recognised in him a rare knack with
foreign tongues, but reflected, and even with extravagance declared,
that it was a pity to have gone so far from home only to remain so
homely. Moreover, Nick had his ideas about the diplomatic mind, finding
in it, for his own sympathy, always the wrong turn. Dry, narrow, barren,
poor he pronounced it in familiar conversation with the clever
secretary; wanting in imagination, in generosity, in the finest
perceptions and the highest courage. This served as well as anything
else to keep the peace between them; it was a necessity of their
friendly intercourse that they should scuffle a little, and it scarcely
mattered what they scuffled about. Nick Dormer's express enjoyment of
Paris, the shop-windows on the quays, the old books on the parapet, the
gaiety of the river, the grandeur of the Louvre, every fine feature of
that prodigious face, struck his companion as a sign of insularity; the
appreciation of such things having become with Sherringham an
unconscious habit, a contented assimilation. If poor Nick, for the
hour, was demonstrative and lyrical, it was because he had no other way
of sounding the note of farewell to the independent life of which the
term seemed now definitely in sight--the sense so pressed upon him that
these were the last moments of his freedom. He would waste time till
half-past seven, because half-past seven meant dinner, and dinner meant
his mother solemnly attended by the strenuous shade of his father and
re-enforced by Julia.




VI


When he arrived with the three members of his family at the restaurant
of their choice Peter Sherringham was already seated there by one of the
immaculate tables, but Mrs. Dallow was not yet on the scene, and they
had time for a sociable settlement--time to take their places and unfold
their napkins, crunch their rolls, breathe the savoury air, and watch
the door, before the usual raising of heads and suspension of forks, the
sort of stir that accompanied most of this lady's movements, announced
her entrance. The _dame de comptoir_ ducked and re-ducked, the people
looked round, Peter and Nick got up, there was a shuffling of
chairs--Julia had come. Peter was relating how he had stopped at her
hotel to bring her with him and had found her, according to her custom,
by no means ready; on which, fearing his guests would arrive first at
the rendezvous and find no proper welcome, he had come off without her,
leaving her to follow. He had not brought a friend, as he intended,
having divined that Julia would prefer a pure family party if she wanted
to talk about her candidate. Now she stood looking down at the table and
her expectant kinsfolk, drawing off her gloves, letting her brother draw
off her jacket, lifting her hands for some rearrangement of her hat. She
looked at Nick last, smiling, but only for a moment. She said to Peter:
"Are we going to dine here? Oh dear, why didn't you have a private
room?"

Nick had not seen her at all for several weeks and had seen her but
little for a year, but her off-hand cursory manner had not altered in
the interval. She spoke remarkably fast, as if speech were not in itself
a pleasure--to have it over as soon as possible; and her _brusquerie_
was of the dark shade friendly critics account for by pleading shyness.
Shyness had never appeared to him an ultimate quality or a real
explanation of anything; it only explained an effect by another effect,
neither with a cause to boast of. What he suspected in Julia was that
her mind was less pleasing than her person; an ugly, a really blighting
idea, which as yet he had but half accepted. It was a case in which she
was entitled to the benefit of every doubt and oughtn't to be judged
without a complete trial. Nick meanwhile was afraid of the trial--this
was partly why he had been of late to see her so little--because he was
afraid of the sentence, afraid of anything that might work to lessen the
charm it was actually in the power of her beauty to shed. There were
people who thought her rude, and he hated rude women. If he should
fasten on that view, or rather if that view should fasten on him, what
could still please and what he admired in her would lose too much of its
sweetness. If it be thought odd that he had not yet been able to read
the character of a woman he had known since childhood the answer is that
this character had grown faster than Nick's observation. The growth was
constant, whereas the observation was but occasional, though it had
begun early. If he had attempted inwardly to phrase the matter, as he
probably had not, he might have pronounced the effect she produced upon
him too much a compulsion; not the coercion of design, of importunity,
nor the vulgar pressure of family expectation, a betrayed desire he
should like her enough to marry her, but a mixture of divers urgent
things; of the sense that she was imperious and generous--probably more
the former than the latter--and of a certain prevision of doom, the
influence of the idea that he should come to it, that he was
predestined.

This had made him shrink from knowing the worst about her; not the wish
to get used to it in time, but what was more characteristic of him, the
wish to interpose a temporary illusion. Illusions and realities and
hopes and fears, however, fell into confusion whenever he met her after
a separation. The separation, so far as seeing her alone or as
continuous talk was concerned, had now been tolerably long; had lasted
really ever since his failure to regain his seat. An impression had come
to him that she judged that failure rather stiffly, had thought, and had
somewhat sharply said, that he ought to have done better. This was a
part of her imperious way, and a part not _all_ to be overlooked on a
mere present basis. If he were to marry her he should come to an
understanding with her: he should give her his own measure as well as
take hers. But the understanding might in the actual case suggest too
much that he _was_ to marry her. You could quarrel with your wife
because there were compensations--for her; but you mightn't be prepared
to offer these compensations as prepayment for the luxury of
quarrelling.

It was not that such a luxury wouldn't be considerable, our young man
none the less thought as Julia Dallow's fine head poised itself before
him again; a high spirit was of course better than a mawkish to be
mismated with, any day in the year. She had much the same colour as her
brother, but as nothing else in her face was the same the resemblance
was not striking. Her hair was of so dark a brown that it was commonly
regarded as black, and so abundant that a plain arrangement was required
to keep it in natural relation to the rest of her person. Her eyes were
of a grey sometimes pronounced too light, and were not sunken in her
face, but placed well on the surface. Her nose was perfect, but her
mouth was too small; and Nick Dormer, and doubtless other persons as
well, had sometimes wondered how with such a mouth her face could have
expressed decision. Her figure helped it, for she appeared tall--being
extremely slender--yet was not; and her head took turns and positions
which, though a matter of but half an inch out of the common this way or
that, somehow contributed to the air of resolution and temper. If it had
not been for her extreme delicacy of line and surface she might have
been called bold; but as it was she looked refined and quiet--refined by
tradition and quiet for a purpose. And altogether she was beautiful,
with the gravity of her elegant head, her hair like the depths of
darkness, her eyes like its earlier clearing, her mouth like a rare pink
flower.

Peter said he had not taken a private room because he knew Biddy's
tastes; she liked to see the world--she had told him so--the curious
people, the coming and going of Paris. "Oh anything for Biddy!" Julia
replied, smiling at the girl and taking her place. Lady Agnes and her
elder daughter exchanged one of their looks, and Nick exclaimed jocosely
that he didn't see why the whole party should be sacrificed to a
presumptuous child. The presumptuous child blushingly protested she had
never expressed any such wish to Peter, upon which Nick, with broader
humour, revealed that Peter had served them so out of stinginess: he had
pitchforked them together in the public room because he wouldn't go to
the expense of a _cabinet_. He had brought no guest, no foreigner of
distinction nor diplomatic swell, to honour them, and now they would see
what a paltry dinner he would give them. Peter stabbed him indignantly
with a long roll, and Lady Agnes, who seemed to be waiting for some
manifestation on Mrs. Dallow's part which didn't come, concluded, with a
certain coldness, that they quite sufficed to themselves for privacy as
well as for society. Nick called attention to this fine phrase of his
mother's and said it was awfully neat, while Grace and Biddy looked
harmoniously at Julia's clothes. Nick felt nervous and joked a good deal
to carry it off--a levity that didn't prevent Julia's saying to him
after a moment: "You might have come to see me to-day, you know. Didn't
you get my message from Peter?"

"Scold him, Julia--scold him well. I begged him to go," said Lady Agnes;
and to this Grace added her voice with an "Oh Julia, do give it to him!"
These words, however, had not the effect they suggested, since Mrs.
Dallow only threw off for answer, in her quick curt way, that that would
be making far too much of him. It was one of the things in her that Nick
mentally pronounced ungraceful, the perversity of pride or of shyness
that always made her disappoint you a little if she saw you expected a
thing. She snubbed effusiveness in a way that yet gave no interesting
hint of any wish to keep it herself in reserve. Effusiveness, however,
certainly, was the last thing of which Lady Agnes would have consented
to be accused; and Nick, while he replied to Julia that he was sure he
shouldn't have found her, was not unable to perceive the operation on
his mother of that shade of manner. "He ought to have gone; he owed you
that," she went on; "but it's very true he would have had the same luck
as we. I went with the girls directly after luncheon. I suppose you got
our card."

"He might have come after I came in," said Mrs. Dallow.

"Dear Julia, I'm going to see you to-night. I've been waiting for that,"
Nick returned.

"Of course _we_ had no idea when you'd come in," said Lady Agnes.

"I'm so sorry. You must come to-morrow. I hate calls at night," Julia
serenely added.

"Well then, will you roam with me? Will you wander through Paris on my
arm?" Nick asked, smiling. "Will you take a drive with me?"

"Oh that would be perfection!" cried Grace.

"I thought we were all going somewhere--to the Hippodrome, Peter," Biddy
said.

"Oh not all; just you and me!" laughed Peter.

"I'm going home to my bed. I've earned my rest," Lady Agnes sighed.

"Can't Peter take _us_?" demanded Grace. "Nick can take you home, mamma,
if Julia won't receive him, and I can look perfectly after Peter and
Biddy."

"Take them to something amusing; please take them," Mrs. Dallow said to
her brother. Her voice was kind, but had the expectation of assent in
it, and Nick observed both the good nature and the pressure. "You're
tired, poor dear," she continued to Lady Agnes. "Fancy your being
dragged about so! What did you come over for?"

"My mother came because I brought her," Nick said. "It's I who have
dragged her about. I brought her for a little change. I thought it would
do her good. I wanted to see the Salon."

"It isn't a bad time. I've a carriage and you must use it; you must use
nothing else. It shall take you everywhere. I'll drive you about
to-morrow." Julia dropped these words with all her air of being able
rather than of wanting; but Nick had already noted, and he noted now
afresh and with pleasure, that her lack of unction interfered not a bit
with her always acting. It was quite sufficiently manifest to him that
for the rest of the time she might be near his mother she would do for
her numberless good turns. She would give things to the girls--he had a
private adumbration of that; expensive Parisian, perhaps not perfectly
useful, things.

Lady Agnes was a woman who measured outlays and returns, but she was
both too acute and too just not to recognise the scantest offer from
which an advantage could proceed. "Dear Julia!" she exclaimed
responsively; and her tone made this brevity of acknowledgment adequate.
Julia's own few words were all she wanted. "It's so interesting about
Harsh," she added. "We're immensely excited."

"Yes, Nick looks it. _Merci, pas de vin_. It's just the thing for you,
you know," Julia said to him.

"To be sure he knows it. He's immensely grateful. It's really very kind
of you."

"You do me a very great honour, Julia," Nick hastened to add.

"Don't be tiresome, please," that lady returned.

"We'll talk about it later. Of course there are lots of points," Nick
pursued. "At present let's be purely convivial. Somehow Harsh is such a
false note here. _Nous causerons de ca_."

"My dear fellow, you've caught exactly the tone of Mr. Gabriel Nash,"
Peter Sherringham declared on this.

"Who's Mr. Gabriel Nash?" Mrs. Dallow asked.

"Nick, is he a gentleman? Biddy says so," Grace Dormer interposed before
this inquiry was answered.

"It's to be supposed that any one Nick brings to lunch with us--!" Lady
Agnes rather coldly sighed.

"Ah Grace, with your tremendous standard!" her son said; while Peter
Sherringham explained to his sister that Mr. Nash was Nick's new Mentor
or oracle--whom, moreover, she should see if she would come and have tea
with him.

"I haven't the least desire to see him," Julia made answer, "any more
than I have to talk about Harsh and bore poor Peter."

"Oh certainly, dear, you'd bore me," her brother rang out.

"One thing at a time then. Let us by all means be convivial. Only you
must show me how," Mrs. Dallow went on to Nick. "What does he mean,
Cousin Agnes? Does he want us to drain the wine-cup, to flash with
repartee?"

"You'll do very well," said Nick. "You're thoroughly charming to-night."

"Do go to Peter's, Julia, if you want something exciting. You'll see a
wonderful girl," Biddy broke in with her smile on Peter.

"Wonderful for what?"

"For thinking she can act when she can't," said the roguish Biddy.

"Dear me, what people you all know! I hate Peter's theatrical people."

"And aren't you going home, Julia?" Lady Agnes inquired.

"Home to the hotel?"

"Dear, no, to Harsh--to see about everything."

"I'm in the midst of telegrams. I don't know yet."

"I suppose there's no doubt they'll have him," Lady Agnes decided to
pursue.

"Who'll have whom?"

"Why, the local people and the party managers. I'm speaking of the
question of my son's standing."

"They'll have the person I want them to have, I daresay. There are so
many people in it, in one way or another--it's dreadful. I like the way
you sit there," Julia went on to Nick.

"So do I," he smiled back at her; and he thought she _was_ charming now,
because she was gay and easy and willing really, though she might plead
incompetence, to understand how jocose a dinner in a pothouse in a
foreign town might be. She was in good humour or was going to be, and
not grand nor stiff nor indifferent nor haughty nor any of the things
people who disliked her usually found her and sometimes even a little
made him believe her. The spirit of mirth in some cold natures manifests
itself not altogether happily, their effort of recreation resembles too
much the bath of the hippopotamus; but when Mrs. Dallow put her elbows
on the table one felt she could be trusted to get them safely off again.

For a family in mourning the dinner was lively; the more so that before
it was half over Julia had arranged that her brother, eschewing the
inferior spectacle, should take the girls to the Theatre Francais. It
was her idea, and Nick had a chance to observe how an idea was apt to be
not successfully controverted when it was Julia's. Even the programme
appeared to have been prearranged to suit it, just the thing for the
cheek of the young person--_Il ne Faut Jurer de Rien_ and _Mademoiselle
de la Seigliere_. Peter was all willingness, but it was Julia who
settled it, even to sending for the newspaper--he was by a rare accident
unconscious of the evening's bill--and to reassuring Biddy, who was
happy but anxious, on the article of their being too late for good
places. Peter could always get good places: a word from him and the best
box was at his disposal. She made him write the word on a card and saw a
messenger despatched with it to the Rue de Richelieu; and all this
without loudness or insistence, parenthetically and authoritatively. The
box was bespoken and the carriage, as soon as they had had their coffee,
found to be in attendance. Peter drove off in it with the girls,
understanding that he was to send it back, and Nick waited for it over
the finished repast with the two ladies. After this his mother was
escorted to it and conveyed to her apartments, and all the while it had
been Julia who governed the succession of events. "Do be nice to her,"
Lady Agnes breathed to him as he placed her in the vehicle at the door
of the cafe; and he guessed it gave her a comfort to have left him
sitting there with Mrs. Dallow.

He had every disposition to be nice to his charming cousin; if things
went as she liked them it was the proof of a certain fine force in
her--the force of assuming they would. Julia had her differences--some
of them were much for the better; and when she was in a mood like this
evening's, liberally dominant, he was ready to encourage most of what
she took for granted. While they waited for the return of the carriage,
which had rolled away with his mother, she sat opposite him with her
elbows on the table, playing first with one and then with another of the
objects that encumbered it; after five minutes of which she exclaimed,
"Oh I say, well go!" and got up abruptly, asking for her jacket. He said
something about the carriage and its order to come back for them, and
she replied, "Well, it can go away again. I don't want a carriage," she
added: "I want to walk"--and in a moment she was out of the place, with
the people at the tables turning round again and the _caissiere_ swaying
in her high seat. On the pavement of the boulevard she looked up and
down; there were people at little tables by the door; there were people
all over the broad expanse of the asphalt; there was a profusion of
light and a pervasion of sound; and everywhere, though the establishment
at which they had been dining was not in the thick of the fray, the
tokens of a great traffic of pleasure, that night-aspect of Paris which
represents it as a huge market for sensations. Beyond the Boulevard des
Capucines it flared through the warm evening like a vast bazaar, and
opposite the Cafe Durand the Madeleine rose theatrical, a high artful
_decor_ before the footlights of the Rue Royale. "Where shall we go,
what shall we do?" Mrs. Dallow asked, looking at her companion and
somewhat to his surprise, as he had supposed she wanted but to go home.

"Anywhere you like. It's so warm we might drive instead of going
indoors. We might go to the Bois. That would be agreeable."

"Yes, but it wouldn't be walking. However, that doesn't matter. It's
mild enough for anything--for sitting out like all these people. And
I've never walked in Paris at night. It would amuse me."

Nick hesitated. "So it might, but it isn't particularly recommended to
ladies."

"I don't care for that if it happens to suit me."

"Very well then, we'll walk to the Bastille if you like."

Julia hesitated, on her side, still looking about. "It's too far; I'm
tired; we'll sit here." And she dropped beside an empty table on the
"terrace" of M. Durand. "This will do; it's amusing enough and we can
look at the Madeleine--that's respectable. If we must have something
we'll have a _madere_--is that respectable? Not particularly? So much
the better. What are those people having? _Bocks_? Couldn't we have
_bocks_? Are they very low? Then I shall have one. I've been so
wonderfully good--I've been staying at Versailles: _je me dois bien
cela_."

She insisted, but pronounced the thin liquid in the tall glass very
disgusting when it was brought. Nick was amazed, reflecting that it was
not for such a discussion as this that his mother had left him with
hands in his pockets. He had been looking out, but as his eloquence
flowed faster he turned to his friend, who had dropped upon a sofa with
her face to the window. She had given her jacket and gloves to her maid,
but had kept on her hat; and she leaned forward a little as she sat,
clasping her hands together in her lap and keeping her eyes on him. The
lamp, in a corner, was so thickly veiled that the room was in tempered
obscurity, lighted almost equally from the street and the brilliant
shop-fronts opposite. "Therefore why be sapient and solemn about it,
like an editorial in a newspaper?" Nick added with a smile.

She continued to look at him after he had spoken, then she said: "If you
don't want to stand you've only to say so. You needn't give your
reasons."

"It's too kind of you to let me off that! And then I'm a tremendous
fellow for reasons; that's my strong point, don't you know? I've a lot
more besides those I've mentioned, done up and ready for delivery. The
odd thing is that they don't always govern my behaviour. I rather think
I do want to stand."

"Then what you said just now was a speech," Julia declared.

"A speech?"

"The 'rot,' the humbug of the hustings."

"No, those great truths remain, and a good many others. But an inner
voice tells me I'm in for it. And it will be much more graceful to
embrace this opportunity, accepting your co-operation, than to wait for
some other and forfeit that advantage."

"I shall be very glad to help you anywhere," she went on.

"Thanks awfully," he returned, still standing there with his hands in
his pockets. "You'd do it best in your own place, and I've no right to
deny myself such a help."

Julia calmly considered. "I don't do it badly."

"Ah you're so political!"

"Of course I am; it's the only decent thing to be. But I can only help
you if you'll help yourself. I can do a good deal, but I can't do
everything. If you'll work I'll work with you; but if you're going into
it with your hands in your pockets I'll have nothing to do with you."
Nick instantly changed the position of these members and sank into a
seat with his elbows on his knees. "You're very clever, but you must
really take a little trouble. Things don't drop into people's mouths."

"I'll try--I'll try. I've a great incentive," he admitted.

"Of course you have."

"My mother, my poor mother." Julia breathed some vague sound and he went
on: "And of course always my father, dear good man. My mother's even
more political than you."

"I daresay she is, and quite right!" said Mrs. Dallow.

"And she can't tell me a bit more than you can what she thinks, what she
believes, what she wants."

"Pardon me, I can tell you perfectly. There's one thing I always
immensely want--to keep out a Tory."

"I see. That's a great philosophy."

"It will do very well. And I desire the good of the country. I'm not
ashamed of that."

"And can you give me an idea of what it is--the good of the country?"

"I know perfectly what it isn't. It isn't what the Tories want to do."

"What do they want to do?"

"Oh it would take me long to tell you. All sorts of trash."

"It would take you long, and it would take them longer! All they want
to do is to prevent _us_ from doing. On our side we want to prevent them
from preventing us. That's about as clearly as we all see it. So on both
sides it's a beautiful, lucid, inspiring programme."

"I don't believe in you," Mrs. Dallow replied to this, leaning back on
her sofa.

"I hope not, Julia, indeed!" He paused a moment, still with his face
toward her and his elbows on his knees; then he pursued: "You're a very
accomplished woman and a very zealous one; but you haven't an idea, you
know--not to call an idea. What you mainly want is to be at the head of
a political salon; to start one, to keep it up, to make it a success."

"Much you know me!" Julia protested; but he could see, through the
dimness, that her face spoke differently.

"You'll have it in time, but I won't come to it," Nick went on.

"You can't come less than you do."

"When I say you'll have it I mean you've already got it. That's why I
don't come."

"I don't think you know what you mean," said Mrs. Dallow. "I've an idea
that's as good as any of yours, any of those you've treated me to this
evening, it seems to me--the simple idea that one ought to do something
or other for one's country."

"'Something or other' certainly covers all the ground. There's one thing
one can always do for one's country, which is not to be afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

Nick Dormer waited a little, as if his idea amused him, but he presently
said, "I'll tell you another time. It's very well to talk so glibly of
standing," he added; "but it isn't absolutely foreign to the question
that I haven't got the cash."

"What did you do before?" she asked.

"The first time my father paid."

"And the other time?"

"Oh Mr. Carteret."

"Your expenses won't be at all large; on the contrary," said Julia.

"They shan't be; I shall look out sharp for that. I shall have the great
Hutchby."

"Of course; but you know I want you to do it well." She paused an
instant and then: "Of course you can send the bill to me."

"Thanks awfully; you're tremendously kind. I shouldn't think of that."
Nick Dormer got up as he spoke, and walked to the window again, his
companion's eyes resting on him while he stood with his back to her. "I
shall manage it somehow," he wound up.

"Mr. Carteret will be delighted," said Julia.

"I daresay, but I hate taking people's money."

"That's nonsense--when it's for the country. Isn't it for _them_?"

"When they get it back!" Nick replied, turning round and looking for his
hat. "It's startlingly late; you must be tired." Mrs. Dallow made no
response to this, and he pursued his quest, successful only when he
reached a duskier corner of the room, to which the hat had been
relegated by his cousin's maid. "Mr. Carteret will expect so much if he
pays. And so would you."

"Yes, I'm bound to say I should! I should expect a great
deal--everything." And Mrs. Dallow emphasised this assertion by the way
she rose erect. "If you're riding for a fall, if you're only going in to
miss it, you had better stay out."

"How can I miss it with _you_?" the young man smiled. She uttered a
word, impatiently but indistinguishably, and he continued: "And even if
I do it will have been immense fun."

"It is immense fun," said Julia. "But the best fun is to win. If you
don't----!"

"If I don't?" he repeated as she dropped.

"I'll never speak to you again."

"How much you expect even when you don't pay!"

Mrs. Dallow's rejoinder was a justification of this remark, expressing
as it did the fact that should they receive on the morrow information on
which she believed herself entitled to count, information tending to
show how hard the Conservatives meant to fight, she should look to him
to be in the field as early as herself. Sunday was a lost day; she
should leave Paris on Monday.

"Oh they'll fight it hard; they'll put up Kingsbury," said Nick,
smoothing his hat. "They'll all come down--all that can get away. And
Kingsbury has a very handsome wife."

"She's not so handsome as your cousin," Julia smiled.

"Oh dear, no--a cousin sooner than a wife any day!" Nick laughed as soon
as he had said this, as if the speech had an awkward side; but the
reparation perhaps scarcely mended it, the exaggerated mock-meekness
with which he added: "I'll do any blessed thing you tell me."

"Come here to-morrow then--as early as ten." She turned round, moving to
the door with him; but before they reached it she brought out: "Pray
isn't a gentleman to do anything, to be anything?"

"To be anything----?"

"If he doesn't aspire to serve the State."

"Aspire to make his political fortune, do you mean? Oh bless me, yes,
there are other things."

"What other things that can compare with that?"

"Well, I for instance, I'm very fond of the arts."

"Of the arts?" she echoed.

"Did you never hear of them? I'm awfully fond of painting."

At this Julia stopped short, and her fine grey eyes had for a moment the
air of being set further forward in her head. "Don't be odious!
Good-night," she said, turning away and leaving him to go.




BOOK SECOND




VII


Peter Sherringham reminded Nick the next day that he had promised to be
present at Madame Carre's interview with the ladies introduced to her by
Gabriel Nash; and in the afternoon, conformably to this arrangement, the
two men took their way to the Rue de Constantinople. They found Mr. Nash
and his friends in the small beflounced drawing-room of the old actress,
who, as they learned, had sent in a request for ten minutes' grace,
having been detained at a lesson--a rehearsal of the _comedie de salon_
about to be given for a charity by a fine lady, at which she had
consented to be present as an adviser. Mrs. Rooth sat on a black satin
sofa with her daughter beside her while Gabriel Nash, wandering about
the room, looked at the votive offerings which converted the little
panelled box, decorated in sallow white and gold, into a theatrical
museum: the presents, the portraits, the wreaths, the diadems, the
letters, framed and glazed, the trophies and tributes and relics
collected by Madame Carre during half a century of renown. The profusion
of this testimony was hardly more striking than the confession of
something missed, something hushed, which seemed to rise from it all and
make it melancholy, like a reference to clappings which, in the nature
of things, could now only be present as a silence: so that if the place
was full of history it was the form without the fact, or at the most a
redundancy of the one to a pinch of the other--the history of a mask,
of a squeak, of a series of vain gestures.

Some of the objects exhibited by the distinguished artist, her early
portraits, in lithograph or miniature, represented the costume and
embodied the manner of a period so remote that Nick Dormer, as he
glanced at them, felt a quickened curiosity to look at the woman who
reconciled being alive to-day with having been alive so long ago. Peter
Sherringham already knew how she managed this miracle, but every visit
he paid her added to his amused, charmed sense that it _was_ a miracle
and that his extraordinary old friend had seen things he should never,
never see. Those were just the things he wanted to see most, and her
duration, her survival, cheated him agreeably and helped him a little to
guess them. His appreciation of the actor's art was so systematic that
it had an antiquarian side, and at the risk of representing him as
attached to an absurd futility it must be said that he had as yet hardly
known a keener regret for anything than for the loss of that antecedent
world, and in particular for his having belatedly missed the great
_comedienne_, the light of the French stage in the early years of the
century, of whose example and instruction Madame Carre had had the
inestimable benefit. She had often described to him her rare
predecessor, straight from whose hands she had received her most
celebrated parts and of whom her own manner was often a religious
imitation; but her descriptions troubled him more than they consoled,
only confirming his theory, to which so much of his observation had
already ministered, that the actor's art in general was going down and
down, descending a slope with abysses of vulgarity at its foot, after
having reached its perfection, more than fifty years ago, in the talent
of the lady in question. He would have liked to dwell for an hour
beneath the meridian.

Gabriel Nash introduced the new-comers to his companions; but the
younger of the two ladies gave no sign of lending herself to this
transaction. The girl was very white; she huddled there, silent and
rigid, frightened to death, staring, expressionless. If Bridget Dormer
had seen her at this moment she might have felt avenged for the
discomfiture of her own spirit suffered at the Salon, the day before,
under the challenging eyes of Maud Vavasour. It was plain at the present
hour that Miss Vavasour would have run away had she not regarded the
persons present as so many guards and keepers. Her appearance made Nick
feel as if the little temple of art in which they were collected had
been the waiting-room of a dentist. Sherringham had seen a great many
nervous girls tremble before the same ordeal, and he liked to be kind to
them, to say things that would help them to do themselves justice. The
probability in a given case was almost overwhelmingly in favour of their
having any other talent one could think of in a higher degree than the
dramatic; but he could rarely refrain from some care that the occasion
shouldn't be, even as against his conscience, too cruel. There were
occasions indeed that could scarce be too cruel to punish properly
certain examples of presumptuous ineptitude. He remembered what Mr. Nash
had said about this blighted maiden, and perceived that though she might
be inept she was now anything but presumptuous. Gabriel fell to talking
with Nick Dormer while Peter addressed himself to Mrs. Rooth. There was
no use as yet for any direct word to the girl, who was too scared even
to hear. Mrs. Rooth, with her shawl fluttering about her, nestled
against her daughter, putting out her hand to take one of Miriam's
soothingly. She had pretty, silly, near-sighted eyes, a long thin nose,
and an upper lip which projected over the under as an ornamental cornice
rests on its support. "So much depends--really everything!" she said in
answer to some sociable observation of Sherringham's. "It's either
this," and she rolled her eyes expressively about the room, "or it's--I
don't know what!"

"Perhaps we're too many," Peter hazarded to her daughter. "But really
you'll find, after you fairly begin, that you'll do better with four or
five."

Before she answered she turned her head and lifted her fine eyes. The
next instant he saw they were full of tears. The words she spoke,
however, though uttered as if she had tapped a silver gong, had not the
note of sensibility: "Oh, I don't care for _you_!" He laughed at this,
declared it was very well said and that if she could give Madame Carre
such a specimen as that----! The actress came in before he had finished
his phrase, and he observed the way the girl ruefully rose to the
encounter, hanging her head a little and looking out from under her
brows. There was no sentiment in her face--only a vacancy of awe and
anguish which had not even the merit of being fine of its kind, for it
spoke of no spring of reaction. Yet the head was good, he noted at the
same moment; it was strong and salient and made to tell at a distance.
Madame Carre scarcely heeded her at first, greeting her only in her
order among the others and pointing to seats, composing the circle with
smiles and gestures, as if they were all before the prompter's box. The
old actress presented herself to a casual glance as a red-faced, raddled
woman in a wig, with beady eyes, a hooked nose, and pretty hands; but
Nick Dormer, who had a sense for the over-scored human surface, soon
observed that these comparatively gross marks included a great deal of
delicate detail--an eyebrow, a nostril, a flitting of expressions, as if
a multitude of little facial wires were pulled from within. This
accomplished artist had in particular a mouth which was visibly a rare
instrument, a pair of lips whose curves and fine corners spoke of a
lifetime of "points" unerringly made and verses exquisitely spoken,
helping to explain the purity of the sound that issued from them. Her
whole countenance had the look of long service--of a thing infinitely
worn and used, drawn and stretched to excess, with its elasticity
overdone and its springs relaxed, yet religiously preserved and kept in
repair, even as some valuable old timepiece which might have quivered
and rumbled but could be trusted to strike the hour. At the first words
she spoke Gabriel Nash exclaimed endearingly: _"Ah la voix de
Celimene!"_ Celimene, who wore a big red flower on the summit of her
dense wig, had a very grand air, a toss of the head, and sundry little
majesties of manner; in addition to which she was strange, almost
grotesque, and to some people would have been even terrifying, capable
of reappearing, with her hard eyes, as a queer vision of the darkness.
She excused herself for having made the company wait, and mouthed and
mimicked in the drollest way, with intonations as fine as a flute, the
performance and the pretensions of the _belles dames_ to whom she had
just been endeavouring to communicate a few of the rudiments. _"Mais
celles-la, c'est une plaisanterie,"_ she went on to Mrs. Rooth; "whereas
you and your daughter, _chere madame_--I'm sure you are quite another
matter."

The girl had got rid of her tears, and was gazing at her, and Mrs. Rooth
leaned forward and said portentously: "She knows four languages."

Madame Carre gave one of her histrionic stares, throwing back her head.
"That's three too many. The thing's to do something proper with one."

"We're very much in earnest," continued Mrs. Rooth, who spoke excellent
French.

"I'm glad to hear it--_il n'y a que ca. La tete est bien_--the head's
very good," she said as she looked at the girl. "But let us see, my dear
child, what you've got in it!" The young lady was still powerless to
speak; she opened her lips, but nothing came. With the failure of this
effort she turned her deep sombre eyes to the three men. "_Un beau
regard_--it carries well." Madame Carre further commented. But even as
she spoke Miss Rooth's fine gaze was suffused again and the next moment
she had definitely begun to weep. Nick Dormer sprung up; he felt
embarrassed and intrusive--there was such an indelicacy in sitting there
to watch a poor working-girl's struggle with timidity. There was a
momentary confusion; Mrs. Rooth's tears were seen also to flow; Mr. Nash
took it gaily, addressing, however, at the same time, the friendliest,
most familiar encouragement to his companions, and Peter Sherringham
offered to retire with Nick on the spot, should their presence incommode
the young lady. But the agitation was over in a minute; Madame Carre
motioned Mrs. Rooth out of her seat and took her place beside the girl,
and Nash explained judiciously to the other men that she'd be worse
should they leave her. Her mother begged them to remain, "so that there

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