audibly at your expense
wasn't an ordeal worth talking of; the hardest thing about it was merely
that there had not been enough of them to yield a proportion of good
ones. Nick had felt in fine the benefit of living in an age and in a
society where number and pressure have, for the individual figure,
especially when it's a zero, compensations almost equal to their
cruelties.

No, the pinch for his conscience after a few weeks had passed was simply
an acute mistrust of the superficiality of performance into which the
desire to justify himself might hurry him. That desire was passionate
as regards Julia Dallow; it was ardent also as regards his mother; and,
to make it absolutely uncomfortable, it was complicated with the
conviction that neither of them would know his justification even when
she should see it. They probably couldn't know it if they would, and
very certainly wouldn't if they could. He assured himself, however, that
this limitation wouldn't matter; it was their affair--his own was simply
to have the right sort of thing to show. The work he was now attempting
wasn't the right sort of thing, though doubtless Julia, for instance,
would dislike it almost as much as if it were. The two portraits of
Miriam, after the first exhilaration of his finding himself at large,
filled him with no private glee; they were not in the direction in which
he wished for the present really to move. There were moments when he
felt almost angry, though of course he held his tongue, when by the few
persons who saw them they were pronounced wonderfully clever. That they
were wonderfully clever was just the detestable thing in them, so active
had that cleverness been in making them seem better than they were.
There were people to whom he would have been ashamed to show them, and
these were the people whom it would give him most pleasure some day to
please. Not only had he many an hour of disgust at his actual work, but
he thought he saw as in an ugly revelation that nature had cursed him
with an odious facility and that the lesson of his life, the sternest
and wholesomest, would be to keep out of the trap it had laid for him.
He had fallen into this trap on the threshold and had only scrambled out
with his honour. He had a talent for appearance, and that was the fatal
thing; he had a damnable suppleness and a gift of immediate response, a
readiness to oblige, that made him seem to take up causes which he
really left lying, enabled him