r ladyship's presumptions of cheapness were woefully
belied.

"Who in the world's your comic friend?" Peter Sherringham was meanwhile
asking of his kinsman as they walked together.

"Ah there's something else you lost by going to Cambridge--you lost
Gabriel Nash!"

"He sounds like an Elizabethan dramatist," Sherringham said. "But I
haven't lost him, since it appears now I shan't be able to have you
without him."

"Oh, as for that, wait a little. I'm going to try him again, but I don't
know how he wears. What I mean is that you've probably lost his
freshness, which was the great thing. I rather fear he's becoming
conventional, or at any rate serious."

"Bless me, do you call that serious?"

"He used to be so gay. He had a real genius for playing with ideas. He
was a wonderful talker."

"It seems to me he does very well now," said Peter Sherringham.

"Oh this is nothing. He had great flights of old, very great flights;
one saw him rise and rise and turn somersaults in the blue--one wondered
how far he could go. He's very intelligent, and I should think it might
be interesting to find out what it is that prevents the whole man from
being as good as his parts. I mean in case he isn't so good."

"I see you more than suspect that. Mayn't it be simply that he's too
great an ass?"

"That would be the whole--I shall see in time--but it certainly isn't
one of the parts. It may be the effect, but it isn't the cause, and it's
for the cause I claim an interest. Do you think him an ass for what he
said about the theatre--his pronouncing it a coarse art?"

"To differ from you about him that reason would do," said Sherringham.
"The only bad one would be one that shouldn't preserve our difference.
You needn't tell me you agree with him, for frankly I don't care."

"Then your passion still burns?" Nick Dormer asked.

"My passion--?"

"I don't mean for any individual exponent of the equivocal art: mark the
guilty conscience, mark the rising blush, mark the confusion of mind! I
mean the old sign one knew you best by; your permanent stall at the
Francais, your inveterate attendance at _premieres_, the way you
'follow' the young talents and the old."

"Yes, it's still my little hobby, my little folly if you like,"
Sherringham said. "I don't find I get tired of it. What will you have?
Strong predilections are rather a blessing; they're simplifying. I'm
fond of representation--the representation of life: I like it better, I