aint Gabriel Nash."

"Gabriel Nash--as a substitute for you?"

"It will be a good way to get rid of him. Paint Mrs. Dallow too," Miriam
went on as she passed out of the door he had opened for her--"paint Mrs.
Dallow if you wish to eradicate the last possibility of a throb."

It was strange that, since only a moment before he had been in a state
of mind to which the superfluity of this reference would have been the
clearest thing about it, he should now have been moved to receive it
quickly, naturally, irreflectively, receive it with the question: "The
last possibility? Do you mean in her or in me?"

"Oh in you. I don't know anything about 'her.'"

"But that wouldn't be the effect," he argued with the same supervening
candour. "I believe that if she were to sit to me the usual law would be
reversed."

"The usual law?"

"Which you cited a while since and of which I recognised the general
truth. In the case you speak of," he said, "I should probably make a
shocking picture."

"And fall in love with her again? Then for God's sake risk the daub!"
Miriam laughed out as she floated away to her victoria.

XLIX

She had guessed happily in saying to him that to offer to paint Gabriel
Nash would be the way to get rid of that visitant. It was with no such
invidious purpose indeed that our young man proposed to his intermittent
friend to sit; rather, as August was dusty in the London streets, he had
too little hope that Nash would remain in town at such a time to oblige
him. Nick had no wish to get rid of his private philosopher; he liked
his philosophy, and though of course premeditated paradox was the light
to read him by he yet had frequently and incidentally an inspired
unexpectedness. He remained in Rosedale Road the man who most produced
by his presence the effect of company. All the other men of Nick's
acquaintance, all his political friends, represented, often very
communicatively, their own affairs, their own affairs alone; which when
they did it well was the most their host could ask of them. But Nash had
the rare distinction that he seemed somehow to figure _his_ affairs, the
said host's, and to show an interest in them unaffected by the ordinary
social limitations of capacity. This relegated him to the class of high
luxuries, and Nick was well aware that we hold our luxuries by a fitful
and precarious tenure. If a friend without personal eagerness was one of
the greatest of these it would be evident t