oo much esteem and affection and who may
be destined to perish by some horrid fever (which God forbid!) in the
unpleasant country he's going to. But he won't have caught his fever
from your humble servant."

"You may kill him even while you remain in perfect health yourself,"
said Nick; "and since we're talking of the matter I don't see the harm
of my confessing that he strikes me as far gone--oh as very bad indeed."

"And yet he's in love with your sister?--_je n'y suis plus_."

"He tries to be, for he sees that as regards you there are difficulties.
He'd like to put his hand on some nice girl who'd be an antidote to his
poison."

"Difficulties are a mild name for them; poison even is a mild name for
the ill he suffers from. The principal difficulty is that he doesn't
know what the devil he wants. The next is that I don't either--or what
the devil I want myself. I only know what I don't want," Miriam kept on
brightly and as if uttering some happy, beneficent truth. "I don't want
a person who takes things even less simply than I do myself. Mr.
Sherringham, poor man, must be very uncomfortable, for one side of him's
in a perpetual row with the other side. He's trying to serve God and
Mammon, and I don't know how God will come off. What I like in you is
that you've definitely let Mammon go--it's the only decent way. That's
my earnest conviction, and yet they call us people light. Dear Mr.
Sherringham has tremendous ambitions--tremendous _riguardi_, as we used
to say in Italy. He wants to enjoy every comfort and to save every
appearance, and all without making a scrap of a sacrifice. He expects
others--me, for instance--to make all the sacrifices. _Merci_, much as I
esteem him and much as I owe him! I don't know how he ever came to stray
at all into our bold, bad, downright Bohemia: it was a cruel trick for
fortune to play him. He can't keep out of it, he's perpetually making
dashes across the border, and yet as soon as he gets here he's on pins
and needles. There's another in whose position--if I were in it--I
wouldn't look at the likes of us!"

"I don't know much about the matter," Nick brought out after some intent
smudging, "but I've an idea Peter thinks he has made or at least is
making sacrifices."

"So much the better--you must encourage him, you must help him."

"I don't know what my daughter's talking about," Mrs. Rooth
contributed--"she's much too paradoxical for my plain mind. But there's
one way to enco