ith Julia during her absence. He
gathered that his mother and sisters were not ignorant of her
whereabouts--he never mentioned her name to them--but as to this he was
not sure if the source of their information had been the _Morning Post_
or a casual letter received by the inscrutable Biddy. He knew Biddy had
some epistolary commerce with Julia; he had an impression Grace
occasionally exchanged letters with Mrs. Gresham. Biddy, however, who,
as he was also well aware, was always studying what he would like,
forbore to talk to him about the absent mistress of Harsh beyond once
dropping the remark that she had gone from Florence to Venice and was
enjoying gondolas and sunsets too much to leave them. Nick's comment on
this was that she was a happy woman to have such a go at Titian and
Tintoret: as he spoke, and for some time afterwards, the sense of how he
himself should enjoy a like "go" made him ache with ineffectual longing.

He had forbidden himself at the present to think of absence, not only
because it would be inconvenient and expensive, but because it would be
a kind of retreat from the enemy, a concession to difficulty. The enemy
was no particular person and no particular body of persons: not his
mother; not Mr. Carteret, who, as he heard from the doctor at Beauclere,
lingered on, sinking and sinking till his vitality appeared to have the
vertical depth of a gold-mine; not his pacified constituents, who had
found a healthy diversion in returning another Liberal wholly without
Mrs. Dallow's aid (she had not participated even to the extent of a
responsive telegram in the election); not his late colleagues in the
House, nor the biting satirists of the newspapers, nor the brilliant
women he took down at dinner-parties--there was only one sense in which
he ever took them down; not in short his friends, his foes, his private
thoughts, the periodical phantom of his shocked father: the enemy was
simply the general awkwardness of his situation. This awkwardness was
connected with the sense of responsibility so greatly deprecated by
Gabriel Nash, Gabriel who had ceased to roam of late on purpose to miss
as few scenes as possible of the drama, rapidly growing dull alas, of
his friend's destiny; but that compromising relation scarcely drew the
soreness from it. The public flurry produced by his collapse had only
been large enough to mark the flatness of our young man's position when
it was over. To have had a few jokes cracked