estion
served as well as another to sprinkle their familiar silences with
chaff. He already knew something, as we have seen, of the conditions in
which his distracted kinsman had left England; and this connected
itself, in casual meditation, with some of the calculations imputable to
Julia and to Biddy. There had naturally been a sequel to the queer
behaviour perceptible in Peter, at the theatre, on the eve of his
departure--a sequel lighted by a word of Miriam's in the course of her
first sitting to Nick after her great night. "Fancy"--so this
observation ran--"fancy the dear man finding time in the press of all
his last duties to ask me to marry him!"

"He told me you had found time in the press of all yours to say you
would," Nick replied. And this was pretty much all that had passed on
the subject between them--save of course her immediately making clear
that Peter had grossly misinformed him. What had happened was that she
had said she would do nothing of the sort. She professed a desire not to
be confronted again with this obnoxious theme, and Nick easily fell in
with it--quite from his own settled inclination not to handle that kind
of subject with her. If Julia had false ideas about him, and if Peter
had them too, his part of the business was to take the simplest course
to establish the falsity. There were difficulties indeed attached even
to the simplest course, but there would be a difficulty the less if one
should forbear to meddle in promiscuous talk with the general,
suggestive topic of intimate unions. It is certain that in these days
Nick cultivated the practice of forbearances for which he didn't
receive, for which perhaps he never would receive, due credit.

He had been convinced for some time that one of the next things he
should hear would be that Julia Dallow had arranged to marry either Mr.
Macgeorge or some other master of multitudes. He could think of that
now, he found--think of it with resignation even when Julia, before his
eyes, looked so handsomely forgetful that her appearance had to be taken
as referring still more to their original intimacy than to his
comparatively superficial offence. What made this accomplishment of his
own remarkable was that there was something else he thought of quite as
much--the fact that he had only to see her again to feel by how great a
charm she had in the old days taken possession of him. This charm
operated apparently in a very direct, primitive way: her pre