un away to Paris
or to Florence, coarse forms of the temptation to persuade himself by
material motion that he was launched. He stayed in London because it
seemed to him he was there more conscious of what he had undertaken, and
he had a horror of shirking the consciousness. One element in it indeed
was his noting how little convenience he could have found in a foreign
journey even had his judgement approved such a subterfuge. The stoppage
of his supplies from Beauclere had now become an historic fact, with
something of the majesty of its class about it: he had had time to see
what a difference this would make in his life. His means were small and
he had several old debts, the number of which, as he believed, loomed
large to his mother's imagination. He could never tell her she
exaggerated, because he told her nothing of that sort in these days:
they had no intimate talk, for an impenetrable partition, a tall,
bristling hedge of untrimmed misconceptions, had sprung up between them.
Poor Biddy had made a hole in it through which she squeezed from side to
side, to keep up communications, at the cost of many rents and
scratches; but Lady Agnes walked straight and stiff, never turning her
head, never stopping to pluck the least little daisy of consolation. It
was in this manner she wished to signify that she had accepted her
wrongs. She draped herself in them as in a Roman mantle and had never
looked so proud and wasted and handsome as now that her eyes rested only
on ruins.

Nick was extremely sorry for her, though he marked as a dreadful want of
grace her never setting a foot in Rosedale Road--she mentioned his
studio no more than if it had been a private gambling-house or something
worse; sorry because he was well aware that for the hour everything must
appear to her to have crumbled. The luxury of Broadwood would have to
crumble: his mind was very clear about that. Biddy's prospects had
withered to the finest, dreariest dust, and Biddy indeed, taking a
lesson from her brother's perversities, seemed little disposed to better
a bad business. She professed the most peace-making sentiments, but when
it came really to doing something to brighten up the scene she showed
herself portentously corrupt. After Peter Sherringham's heartless flight
she had wantonly slighted an excellent opportunity to repair her
misfortune. Lady Agnes had reason to infer, about the end of June, that
young Mr. Grindon, the only son--the other childre