to learn enough about them in an hour to
have all the air of having converted them to his use. Many people used
them--that was the only thing to be said--who had taken them in much
less. He was at all events too clever by half, since this pernicious
overflow had wrecked most of his attempts. He had assumed a virtue and
enjoyed assuming it, and the assumption had cheated his father and his
mother and his affianced wife and his rich benefactor and the candid
burgesses of Harsh and the cynical reporters of the newspapers. His
enthusiasms had been but young curiosity, his speeches had been young
agility, his professions and adhesions had been like postage-stamps
without glue: the head was all right, but they wouldn't stick. He stood
ready now to wring the neck of the irrepressible vice that certainly
would tend to nothing so much as to get him into further trouble. His
only real justification would be to turn patience--his own of
course--inside out; yet if there should be a way to misread that recipe
his humbugging genius could be trusted infallibly to discover it. Cheap
and easy results would dangle before him, little amateurish
conspicuities at exhibitions helped by his history; putting it in his
power to triumph with a quick "What do you say to that?" over those he
had wounded. The fear of this danger was corrosive; it poisoned even
lawful joys. If he should have a striking picture at the Academy next
year it wouldn't be a crime; yet he couldn't help suspecting any
conditions that would enable him to be striking so soon. In this way he
felt quite enough how Gabriel Nash had "had" him whenever railing at his
fever for proof, and how inferior as a productive force the desire to
win over the ill-disposed might be to the principle of quiet growth.
Nash had a foreign manner of lifting up his finger and waving it before
him, as if to put an end to everything, whenever it became, in
conversation or discussion, to any extent a question whether any one
would "like" anything.

It was presumably in some degree at least a due respect for the
principle of quiet growth that kept Nick on the spot at present, made
him stick fast to Rosedale Road and Calcutta Gardens and deny himself
the simplifications of absence. Do what he would he couldn't despoil
himself of the impression that the disagreeable was somehow connected
with the salutary, and the "quiet" with the disagreeable, when
stubbornly borne; so he resisted a hundred impulses to r