The Tragic Muse

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 no doubt quickly perceived, hovering for a moment outside the group. Biddy said nothing to Peter Sherringham, but there was no flatness in a silence which afforded such opportunities for a pretty smile. 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 have seen you very often before.”

“ Ah, recurrence — recurrence : we have n’t yet, in the study of how to live, abolished that grossness, have we?” Mr. Nash genially inquired. " It’s a poverty in the supernumeraries that we don’t pass once for all, but come round and cross again, like a procession at the theatre. It’s a shabby economy that ought to have been managed better. The right thing would be just one appearance, and the procession, regardless of expense, forever and forever 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, is n’t it ? The world is n’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! ” observed Nicholas Dormer. " Nash, please sit by my mother, with Peter on her other side.”

“ My dear, it is n’t Julia,” Lady Agnes remarked, earnestly, to her son. “ Every one wants you. Have n’t you heard from your people ? Did n’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 bœuf braisé, my dear, and afterwards some galantine. Here is 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 have an impression I have breakfasted — I am not sure,” Nash observed.

“ With those beautiful ladies ? Try again ; you ’ll find out.”

“ The money can be managed ; the expenses are very small, and the seat is certain,” Lady Agnes declared, 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 recognize 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 neighbor had separated.

“ Deluded, misguided persons ! ” Gabriel Nash replied, understanding that she had asked for a description. “ Strange, eccentric, almost romantic types. Predestined victims, infatuated lambs of sacrifice.”

This was copious, yet it was vague, so that Biddy could only respond, “ Oh ! ” But meanwhile Peter Sherringham said to Nick—

“ Julia’s here, you know. You must go and see her.”

Nick looked at him for 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 have 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 Gabriel, 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 have to pay to get into that place — that it’s not you that are paid ? ”

“ Into that 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 is this extraordinary person ? ”

“ What then did you think pocketboroughs 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 colored 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.

Gabriel Nash smiled across the table at Dormer. " The lady first — the lady first ! I have not a word to suggest as against any idea of hers.”

“ We must not sit here too long, there will be so much to do,” said Lady Agnes, anxiously, perceiving a certain slowness in the service of the bœuf braisé.

Biddy had been up to this moment mainly occupied in looking, covertly and at intervals, 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 they are dreadful.”

“ No, not dreadful—only inferior,” the personage impugned protested. “ Everything is 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 dry.

“ Ah, then ! ” And her neighbor shook his head sadly. He turned, after this, to Biddy, and said to her, “ 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 are persons theatrical ; the younger one is trying to go upon the stage.”

“ And are you assisting her ? ” Biddy asked, pleased that she had guessed so nearly right.

“ Not in the least — I ’m rat her heading 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 Théâtre Français 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. On the contrary, it seems to me 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 have 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 have really 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 Mr. 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 Français on purpose for a delightful little 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 Gabriel Nash.

“ It would be ungrateful if it did n’t! ” Peter Sherringham laughed.

Lady Agnes had withdrawn herself from between him and Mr. Nash, 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, is n’t the actor more honest ? ”

Lady Agnes turned to her son and exclaimed with spirit, “ Think of your great father, Nicholas ! ”

“ He was an honest man; that perhaps is why he could n’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: is n’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 is more than half a Jewess.”

“ It is as good as Rachel Félix,” Sherringham said.

“ The name’s as good, but not the talent. The girl is magnificently stupid.”

“ And more than half a Jewess ? Don’t you believe it ! ” Sherringham exclaimed.

“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 Carré, Rue de Constantinople, au quatrième.”

“ Madame Carré? ? 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 favor. The ladies want an opinion, and the good Carré has consented to see them and to give one. Gladys will recite something and the venerable artist will pass judgment.”

Sherringham remembered that he had his note in his pocket, and he took it out and looked 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 see an old French actress and to hear an English amateur recite ? ”

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 may not lose sight of you, may keep hold of you.”

“ Poor Mr. Nash, why is he so useful ? ” Lady Agnes demanded with a laugh.

“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 inquired.

“ No. but I want to see something, to know something.”

“ Madame Carré is wonderful in her way, but she is 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 Gabriel Nash. " I think Lady Agnes would hardly venture ” —

“ Oh, I’ve seen her good mother! ” said Biddy, as if she had an impression of what the worth of that protection might be.

“ Yes, but you have n’t heard her. It’s then that you measure her.”

Biddy was wistful still. “Is it the famous Honorine Carré, 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, as she does sometimes still dans le monde. as no one else does, in my rooms.”

“Make her come, then; we can go there ! ”

“ One of these days! ”

“And the young lady — Miriam, Edith, Gladys — make her come too.”

Sherringham looked at Nash and the latter exclaimed, " Oh, you 'll have no difficulty ; she 'll jump at it! ”

“ Very good; I '11 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. The great model will find her very bad. Her judgments, as you probably know, are Rhadamanthine.”

“ Poor girl ! ” said Biddy. " I think you 're cruel.”

“ Never mind ; I 'll look after them,” said Sherringham.

“And how can Madame Carré 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 is n’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 lived upon 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 constituted the most palpable part of her heritage. 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, have n’t we asked Gabriel Nash, — “and I have 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 it and smashed it. It was the last of the little phase. It was not, however, as you have seen, the last of Mrs. Rooth. I saw her afterwards in London, and I met her a year or two ago in Venice. She appears to be a great wanderer. She had other old pots, of other colors, 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 is 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 dare say 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 are both very clever.”said Gabriel Nash, “ and Rudolf Roth, as I happen to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour’s papa. But, as far as the question of derogation goes, one might as well drown as starve, for what connection is not a misalliance when one happens to have the cumbersome, the unaccommodating honor of being a Neville-Nugent of Castle Nugent ? Such was 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 is like him — and she is 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 upon 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 —

“It’s a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable splendor, but I fear it isn’t to be found in any meagre earthly geography ! " Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth, as if she were not sure a liberty had not been taken with her, 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 appeared to have been strongly kindled by the sketch of Miriam Rooth, challenging him sociably, reminded him that he had, a short time before, assigned a low place to the dramatic art, and that he had not yet answered his question as to whether he believed in the theatre. This gave Nash an opportunity to go on —

“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 lime-light, 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 ? ”

“ Dear me, it strikes me as so rich, so various ! Do you think it’s poor and limited, Nick ? ” Sherringham added, appealing to his kinsman.

“ I think whatever Nash thinks. I have no opinion to-day but his.”

This answer of Nick Dormer’s drew the eyes of his mother and sisters to him and caused his friend to exclaim that he was not 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 said to Sherringham.

“I understand you perfectly. “It’s a phase like another. I’ve been through it — j’ai été comme ça.”

“And you went, then, very often to the Théâtre Francais, and it was there I saw you. I place you now.”

“ I am afraid I noticed none of the other spectators,” Nash explained. “ I had no attention but for the great Carré — 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 could n’t rest till I had told her that I hung upon her lips.”

“ That’s just what I told her.” returned Sherringham.

“She was very kind to me. She said, ‘ Vous me rendez des forces.’ ”

“That’s just what she said to me ! ”

“ And we have remained very good friends.”

“ So have we ! " laughed Slierringham. “ 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.” Gabriel Nash blandly rejoined. “ Dramatic intelligence is never rare ; nothing is more common.”

“ Then why have we so many bad 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 did n’t do that? And reflect that that 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 that the actor produces are among the most moving that we know. You ’ll not persuade me that to watch such an actress as Madame Carré was not. 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 raffnés 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 analyzed ? 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 day, 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, 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 could n’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 did n’t defer to them (not so much, at least), and that’s why they are less and less actable. If they are touched — the large fellows — it’s only to be mutilated and trivialized. Besides, they had a simpler civilization 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 are 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 demanded.

“No, but I read them when they are extraordinarily good, and I don’t go to plays. I read Balzac, for instance — I encounter the magnificent portrait of Valérie Marneffe, in La Cousine Bette.”

“ And you contrast it with the poverty of Emile Augier’s Séraphine 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 have seen Madame Carré in parts, in the modern repertory, which she has made as vivid to me, caused to abide as ineffaceably in my memory, as Valérie Marneffe. She is the Balzac, as one may say, of actresses.”

“ The miniaturist, as it were, of whitewashers ! ” Nash rejoined, laughing.

It might have been guessed that Sherringham was irritated, but the other disputant was so good-humored that he abundantly recognized his own obligation to appear so.

“You would be magnanimous if you thought the young lady you have introduced to our old friend would be important.”

“ She might be much more so than she ever will be.”

Lady Agnes got up, to terminate the scene, and even to signify that enough had been said about people and questions she had never heard of. Every one else rose, the waiter brought Nicholas the receipt of the bill, and Sherringham went on, to his interlocutor —

“ Perhaps she will 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 have never seen her, I shall find something in her. What do you say, Biddy, shall I take an interest in her ? ”

Biddy hesitated a moment, colored 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: “Dear me, 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 the part of Nicholas, 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, the practical effect of which was to make light of her presence. “ Let us leave this — let us leave this ! ” she almost moaned. 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 leave us — I stick to you ! ”

At this Lady Agnes broke out and interposed. “Excuse me for reminding you that you are 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 her ladyship’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 favor for another. If Mr. Nash is so good as to introduce me to this aspirant for honors we estimate so differently, I will introduce him to my sister, a much more positive quantity.”

“ It is easy to see who ’ll have the best of it! ” Grace Dormer exclaimed; and Gabriel 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 have a little corner at the embassy.”

“ You are very kind. You must bring him, then, to-morrow—Rue de Constantinople.”

“ At five o’clock — don’t be afraid.”

“ Oh, dear ! " said Biddy, 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 Elysées Nick Dormer, looking round, saw that his friend had disappeared. Biddy had attached herself to Peter, and Grace, apparently, had not encouraged Mr. Nash.

V.

Lady Agnes’s idea had been that her son should go straight from the Palais de l’industrie to the Hôtel de Hollande, with or without his mother and his sisters, as his humor should seem to recommend. Much as she desired to see their brilliant kinswoman, and as she knew that her daughters desired it, she was quite ready to postpone their visit, if this renunciation should contribute to a speedy interview for Nick. She was eager that he should talk with Mrs. Dallow, and eager that he should be eager himself ; but it presently appeared that he was really not anything that could impartially be called so. His view was that she and the girls should go to the Hôtel de Hollande without delay, and should spend the rest of the day with Julia, if they liked. 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, for she was sure this was what he had in his head. Julia would be flattered if she knew it, but of course she must not know it. Lady Agnes was already thinking of the most honorable explanations she could give of the young man’s want of empressement. 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 her relations 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 were not some telegrams.

He freely consented to do so much as this, and having called a cab, that she might go her way with the girls, he 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 often her anxiety was apt to increase ; she had come to recognize it as a sign that he was slipping away from her. 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 Hôtel de Hollande, clear as it had become to her now that there was a foreiguness 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. Of course they were local, and was not that the 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 had not seen it a thousand times !), she wished she might have thought of Peter’s influence with her son as exerted a little more in favor of localism. She had a sense that he would not abbreviate the boy’s ill-timed flânerie. However, he had been very nice. He had invited them all to dine with him that evening at a convenient restaurant, promising to bring Julia and one of his colleagues. So much as this he had been willing to do to make sure that 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 conclusion of this reflection is, perhaps, best indicated by the circumstance of her ladyship’s remarking, after a minute, to her younger daughter, who sat opposite to her in the voiture de place, that it would do no harm if she should get a new hat, and that the article might be purchased that afternoon.

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

“ I think they are prettier here, you know,” Biddy rejoined ; and Lady Agnes said, simply, “I dare say they’re cheaper.” What was in her mind, in fact, was, “ I dare say Peter thinks them becoming.” It will be seen that she had plenty of spiritual occupation, the sum of which was not diminished 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, for she had taken for granted that Julia would be in a manner waiting for them. How did she know that Nick was not coming? When people were in Paris for a few days they did n’t mope in the house ; but Julia might have waited a little longer or might have left an explanation. Was she then not so much in earnest about Nick’s standing? Didn’t she recognize the importance of being there to see him about it ? Lady Agnes wondered whether Julia’s behavior were a sign that she was already tired of the way this young gentleman treated her. Perhaps she had gone out because an instinct told her that its being important he should see her early would make no difference with him — told her that he would n’t come. Her heart sank as she glanced at this possibility that Julia was already tired, for she, on her side, had an instinct there were still more tiresome 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 occurred to her that she would, perhaps, have gone to their hotel, which was a good way up the Rue de Rivoli, near the Palais Royal, and she directed the cabman 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 to her would not be enticing? Her behavior up to this time had not worn such an appearance, unless, perhaps, a little, just a very little, in the matter of poor Grace. Lady Agnes knew that she was not particularly fond of poor Grace, and was even able to guess the reason —the manner in which Grace betrayed the most that they wanted to make sure of her. She remembered how long the girl had stayed the last time she had gone to Harsh. She had gone for an acceptable week, and she had been in the house a month. She took a private, heroic vow that Grace should not go near the place again for a year; that is, not unless Nick and Julia were married before this. If that were to happen, she should n’t care. She recognized that it was not absolutely everything that Julia should be in love with Nick; it was also better she should dislike his mother and sisters after 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 motherin-law, she wished to be the mother-inlaw 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 she 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. Nicholas had said to her before they separated, “ You can knock about with the girls, you know; everything is 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 she was far from finding everything in Paris amusing. She had no aptitude for aimlessness, and, moreover, she 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 presuppositions of cheapness were wofully belied.

“ Who in the world is your funny friend ? ” Peter Sherringham asked of his kinsman, without loss of time, 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 have n’t lost him, since it appears now that I shall not 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 have probably lost his freshness. I have an idea he has become 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 suggestive paradox. He was a wonderful talker.”

“ It seems to me he will do 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, and 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 is n’t so good.”

“ I see you more than suspect that. May it not simply be that he’s an ass ? ”

“ That would be the whole — I shall see in time — but it certainly is n’t one of the parts. It may be the effect, but it is n’t the cause, and it’s for the cause that I claim an interest. I imagine you think he ’s an ass on account of what he said about the theatre, his pronouncing it a coarse art.”

“ To differ about him that reason will do,” said Sherringham. “ The only bad one would be one that should n’t preserve our difference. You need n’t tell me you agree with him, for, frankly, I don’t care.”

“ Then your passion still burns ? ” Nick Dormer asked.

“ My passion ? ”

“ T don’t mean for any Individual exponent of the contestable 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 premières, the way you 'follow’ the young talents and the old.”

“ Yes, it ’s still my little hobby ; my little folly, if you like. I don’t see that I get tired of it. What will you have ? Strong predilections are rather a blessing; they are simplifying. I am fond of representation — the representation of life :

I like it better, I think, than the real thing. You like it, too, so you have no right to cast the stone. You like it best done one way and I another ; and our preference, on either side, has a deep root in us. There is a fascination to me in the way the actor does it, when his talent (ah, he must I 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 give him his push) seem to me innumerable — he can carry it to a delicacy ! — and I take great pleasure in observing them, in recognizing them 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 this 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 ? ” Sherringham abruptly asked.

“ Don’t be ashamed of it, or it will be ashamed of you. I ought to discriminate. You are distinguished among my friends and relations by being a rising young diplomatist; but you know I always want the further distinction, the last analysis. Therefore I surmise that you are conspicuous among rising young diplomatists for the infatuation that you describe in such pretty terms.”

“ You evidently believe that it will prevent me from rising very high. But pastime for pastime, is it any idler than yours? ”

“ Than mine ? ”

“ Why, you have half a dozen, while I only allow myself the luxury of one. For the theatre is my sole vice, really. Is this more wanton, say, than to devote weeks to ascertaining in what particular way your friend Mr. Nash may be a twaddler? That’s not my ideal of a choice délassement, but I would undertake to do it sooner. You ’re a young statesman (who happens to be en disponibilité for the moment), but you spend not a little of your time in besmearing canvas with bright-colored pigments. The idea of representation fascinates you, but in your case it’s representation in oils — or do you practice water-colors, 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 that he would certainly become one — he was 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 him for is that he has n’t any at all. It makes him so cool.”

“ By Jove, you match him there! It’s an attribute to keep alive. How does he do it ? ”

“ I have n’t the least idea. I don’t think any one has ever detected the process. His means, his profession, his belongings, have never anything to do with the question. He does n’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 intercourse 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 are taking up in your grasp all sorts of other people and things, dangling accidents and conditions. Poor Nash has none of those ramifications ; he’s the solitary blossom.”

“ My dear fellow, you would be better for a little of the same pruning ! ” Sherringham exclaimed ; and the young men continued their walk and their gossip, jerking each other this way and that with a sociable roughness consequent on their having been boys together. Intimacy had reigned, of old, between the little Sherringhams and the little Dormers, united by country contiguity and by the circumstance that there was firstcousinship, not neglected, among the parents, Lady Agnes standing in this convertible 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. Since then many things had altered, but not the deep foundation of sociability. One of our young men had gone to Eton and the other to Harrow (the battered old school on the hill was the tradition of the Dormers), and the divergence had taken its course later, in university years. Bricket, however, had remained accessible to Windrush, and Windrush to Bricket, to which 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 international comparison, 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, who died wifeless and childless. The new baronet, so different from his father (though he recalled at some points the uncle after whom he had been named) that Nick had to make it up by aspirations of resemblance, 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 which the British rifle had spared. Lady Agues, meanwhile, settled with her girls in a gabled, latticed house in a creditable quarter, though it was still a little raw, 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 he dined 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-ofthe-way quarter of the town, 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 scarcely would 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 a pure extravagance was known by them to be open to correction ; for they were not oblivious that Mr. Carteret had humors which weighed against them, in the shape of convenient checks nestling between the inside pages of legible letters of advice. Mr. Carteret was Nick’s providence, 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 ungracefully selfish, would operate, mainly with a “ six-bore,” quite out of that sphere. It was not for studios, certainly, that Mr. Carteret sent checks ; 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 Nick could be looked to not to betray such a confidence ; for Mr. Carteret’s behavior 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 honorable 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 favor 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, clustering 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 victory, under his father’s eyes, more than two years before, in the sharp contest for Crackhurst — a victory which his consecrated name, his extreme youth, his ardor in the fray, the general 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, it has since burnt out), had rendered almost brilliant. 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 — Lady Agnes regarded it as famous — as his son had been to stand), which the boy’s mother religiously preserved, cut out and tied together with a ribbon, in the innermost drawer of a favorite 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, almost bullying man. It was to a certain extent a comfort that poor Sir Nicholas, who had been witness of the bright hour, passed away before the darkness. He died, with all his hopes on his second son’s head, unconscious of near disaster, 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 sort of paternal dedication, a solemn 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 hoy’s nature and manner from that moment the most unmistakable traces. If Ins tendency to reverie increased, it was because he had so much to think over in what bis pale father had said to him in the hushed, dim chamber, laying upon him the great mission of carrying out the unachieved and reviving a silent voice. It was work cut out for a lifetime, and that “ coordinating power in relation to detail,” which was one of the great characteristics of Sir Nicholas’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 Crackhurst, Peter Sherringham appeared before a board of examiners who let him off much less easily, though there were also some flattering prejudices in his favor ; such influences being a part of the copious, light, unemarrassing baggage with which each of the young men began life. Peter passed, however, passed high, and had his reward in prompt assignment to a small diplomatic post 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 he was willing enough to rest. 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 color on the matter in speaking of his stall at the Théâtre Francis 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 strange enough to each other to give a taste 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 quarreled if they had only agreed. 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, recognized that he had a rare knack with foreign tongues, but reflected, and even, with extravagance, declared, that intellectually one might have become as good a cosmopolite as that without stepping beyond the park gates at Windrush. Moreover, Nick had his ideas about the diplomatic mind ; it was the moral type of which, on the whole, he thought least favorably. 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 gayety of the river, the grandeur of the Louvre, all the amusing tints and tones, 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 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 reinforced by Julia. WHEN Nick arrived with the three members of his family, Peter Sherringham was seated in the restaurant at which the tryst had been taken at a small but immaculate table ; 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 savory 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, and Julia was there. Peter had related how he had stopped at her hotel to bring her with him, and had found her, according toh her custom, by no means ready; on which, fearing that his guests would come first to 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 there, 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 bonnet. She looked at Nick last, smiling, but only for a moment. She said to Peter. " Are we going to dine here ? Oh dear, why did n’t you have a private room ? ”

VI.

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 kind that 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, and gave a bad fault another name. What he suspected in Julia was that her mind was less graceful than her person ; an ugly, a really damnatory idea, which as yet he had only half accepted. It was a case in which she was entitled to the benefit of every doubt, and ought not to be judged without a complete trial. Dormer, meanwhile, was afraid of the trial (this was partly why, of late, he had been to see her so little), because he was afraid of the sentence, afraid of anything happening which should lessen the pleasure it was actually in the power of her beauty to give. 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 that character had grown faster than Nick Dormer’s observation. The growth was constant, whereas the observation was but occasional, though it had begun early. If he had attempted to phrase the matter to himself, as he probably had not, he might have said that the effect she produced upon him was too much a compulsion ; not the coercion of design, of importunity, nor the vulgar pressure of family expectation, a suspected desire that he should like her enough to marry her, but something that was a mixture of diverse things, of the sense that she was imperious and generous — but 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 ; the desire, not to get used to it in time, but what was more characteristic of him, 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 harshly, had thought he ought to have done better. This was a part of her imperious strain, and a part to which it was not easy to accommodate one’s self on a 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, in the actual case, might suggest top much that he was to marry her. You could quarrel with your wife, because there were compensations — for her ; but you might not be prepared to offer these compensations as prepayment for the luxury of quarreling.

It was not that such a luxury would not be considerable, Nick Dormer thought, as Julia Dallow’s fine head poised itself before him again ; a high spirit was a better thing than a poor one to be mismated with, any day in the year. She had much the same coloring 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 discreet relation to the rest of her person. Her eyes were of a gray tint, that was sometimes pronounced too light; and they 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 looked tall (being extremely slender), though she was not; and her head took turns and positions which, though they were 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 pure style of her intelligent head, her hair like darkness, her eyes like early twilight, her mouth like a rare pink flower.

Peter said that 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 did n’t see why the whole party should be sacrificed to a presumptuous child. The presumptuous child bhishingly protested she had never expressed any such wish to Peter, upon which Nick, with broader humor, revealed that Peter had served them so out of stinginess; he had pitchforked them together in the public room because he would n’t go to the expense of a cabinet. He had brought no guest, no foreigner of distinction nor diplomatic swell, to honor 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 did n’t come, concluded, with a certain coldness, that they quite sufficed to themselves for privacy as well as for distraction. Nick called attention to this fine phrase of his mother’s, said it was awfully neat, while Grace and Biddy looked harmoniously at Julia’s clothes. Nick felt nervous, and joked a good deal to curry 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. Did n’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, for Mrs. Dallow only murmured, with an ejaculation, in her quick, curt way, that that would be making far too much of him. It was one of the things in her which Nick Dormer mentally pronounced ungraceful, that a perversity of pride or shyness always made her disappoint you a little, if she saw you expected a thing. She was certain to snub effusiveness. This vice, however, was the last thing of which Lady Agnes would have consented to being accused; and Nick, while he replied to Julia that he was certain he should n’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 rejoined.

“ Of course we had no idea when you would come in,” said Lady Agnes.

“ I 'm so sorry. You must come tomorrow. I hate calls at night,” Julia remarked.

“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,” said Biddy.

“ Oh, not all; just you and me ! ” laughed Peter.

“ I am going home to my bed. I’ve earned my rest,” Lady Agnes sighed.

“ Can’t Peter take us ? ” asked 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 indulgence 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 is n’t a bad time. I have a carriage, and you must use it; you must use nothing else. It shall take you everywhere. I will drive you about tomorrow.” Julia dropped these words in the same perfunctory, casual way as any others ; but Nick had already noted, and he noted now afresh, with pleasure, that her abruptness was perfectly capable of conveying a benevolence. It was quite sufficiently manifest to him that for the rest of the time she might be near his mother she would do 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 reciprocities and distances; but she was both too subtle and too just not to recognize the smallest manifestation that might count, either technically or essentially, as a service. “ Dear Julia! ” she exclaimed, responsively; and her tone made this brevity of acknowledgment sufficient. What Julia had said was 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.”

“To be sure he knows it. He’s immensely grateful. It’s really very kind of you.”

“ You do me a very great honor, Julia.” said Nick.

“ Don’t be tiresome ! " exclaimed Mrs. Dallow.

“ We ’ll talk about it later. Of course there are lots of points,” Nick pursued.

“ At present let us be purely convivial. Somehow Harsh is such a false note here. A tout à l’heure ! ”

“ My dear fellow, you’ve caught exactly the tone of Mr. Gabriel Nash,” Peter Sherringham observed.

“ Who is Mr. Gabriel Nash ?" Mrs. Dallow asked.

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

“It is to be supposed that any one Nick brings to lunch with us ” — Lady Agnes murmured.

“ Ah, Grace, with your tremendous standard ! ” her brother said : while Peter Sherringham replied to Julia 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 have n’t the least desire to see him,” Julia declared, “any more than I have to talk about Harsh and bore poor Peter.”

“ Oh, certainly, dear, you would bore me,” said Sherringham.

“ 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 are charming, this evening.”

“ Do go to Peter’s, Julia, if you want something exciting. You’ll see a marvelous girl,” Biddy broke in, with her smile on Peter.

“ Marvelous 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 are n’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 will have whom ?”

“ Why, the local people; those who invite a gentleman to stand. I 'm speaking of my son.”

“They’ll have the person I want them to have, I dare say. There are so many people in it, in one way or another, it’s dreadful. I like the way you sit there.” Mrs. Dallow added to Nick Dormer.

“ 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-humor, or she was going to be, and not grand, nor stiff, nor indifferent, nor haughty, nor any of the things that 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 Théâtre Français. 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 — II ne Faut Jurer de Rien and Mademoiselle de la Seiglière. Peter was all willingness, but it was Julia who settled it, even to sending for the newspaper (her brother, by a rare accident, was unconscious of the evening’s bill), and to reassuring Biddy, who was happy but anxious, on the article of their not getting places, their being too late. Peter could always get places ; a word from him, and the best box was at his disposal. She made him write the word on a card, and saw that a messenger was dispatched with it to the Rue de Richelieu ; and all this was done without loudness or insistence, parenthetically and authoritatively. The box was bespoken ; the carriage, as soon as they had had their coffee, was found to be there ; Peter drove off in it with the girls, with the understanding that he was to send it back; Nick sat waiting for it, over the finished repast, with the two ladies, and then his mother was relegated to it and conveyed to her apartments ; and all the while it was Julia who governed the succession of events. “ Do be nice to her,” Lady Agnes murmured to him, as he placed her in the vehicle at the door of the restaurant; and he guessed that it gave her a comfort to have left him sitting there with Mrs. Dallow.

Nick had every disposition to be nice to her ; if things went as she liked them, it was an acknowledgment of a certain force that was in her — the force of assuming that 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 her assumptions. While they waited for the return of the carriage, which had rolled away with his mother, she sat opposite to 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, we ’ll go ! ” and got up abruptly, asking for her jacket. He said something about the carriage having had orders to come back for them, and she replied, “ Well, it can go away again ! ” She added, “ I don’t want a carriage ; 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 caissière swaying in her high seat. On the pavement of the boulevard she looked up and-down : there were people at little tables, at 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 Café Durand the Madeleine rose, theatrical, a high, clever décor, 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 that she only wanted 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 would n’t be walking. However, that does n’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 is n’t particularly recommended to ladies.”

“ I don’t care, 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 round her.

“ 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 madère ; is that respectable ? Not particularly ? So much the better. What are those people having ? Bocks? Could n’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 such complacency ; and indeed he too had, as she would have had, his share of perplexity, observing that nearly half an hour passed without his cousin saying anything about Harsh.

Henry James.