thing that would really answer. He told Nick
more about Miriam, more certainly about her outlook at that moment, than
she herself had communicated, contributing strongly to our young man's
impression that one by one every gage of a great career was being
dropped into her cup. Nick himself tasted of success vicariously for the
hour. Miriam let her comrade talk only to contradict him, and
contradicted him only to show how indifferently she could do it. She
treated him as if she had nothing more to learn about his folly, but as
if it had taken intimate friendship to reveal to her the full extent of
it. Nick didn't mind her intimate friendships, but he ended by disliking
Dashwood, who gave on his nerves--a circumstance poor Julia, had it come
to her knowledge, would doubtless have found deplorably significant.
Miriam was more pleased with herself than ever: she now made no scruple
of admitting that she enjoyed all her advantages. She had a fuller
vision of how successful success could be; she took everything as it
came--dined out every Sunday and even went into the country till the
Monday morning; kept a hundred distinguished names on her lips and
abounded in strange tales of the people who were making up to her. She
struck Nick as less strenuous than she had been hitherto, as making even
an aggressive show of inevitable laxities; but he was conscious of no
obligation to rebuke her for it--the less as he had a dim vision that
some effect of that sort, some irritation of his curiosity, was what she
desired to produce. She would perhaps have liked, for reasons best known
to herself, to look as if she were throwing herself away, not being able
to do anything else. He couldn't talk to her as if he took a deep
interest in her career, because in fact he didn't; she remained to him
primarily and essentially a pictorial object, with the nature of whose
vicissitudes he was concerned--putting common charity and his personal
good nature of course aside--only so far as they had something to say in
her face. How could he know in advance what turn of her experience,
twist of her life, would say most?--so possible was it even that
complete failure or some incalculable perversion (innumerable were the
queer traps that might be set for her) would only make her for his
particular purpose more precious.

When she had left him at any rate, the day she came with Basil Dashwood,
and still more on a later occasion, that of his turning back to his