Germany. Since
then he had had his professional adventures, which need not arrest us,
inasmuch as they had all paled in the light of his appointment, nearly
three years previous to the moment of our making his acquaintance, to a
secretaryship of embassy in Paris. He had done well and had gone fast
and for the present could draw his breath at ease. It pleased him better
to remain in Paris as a subordinate than to go to Honduras as a
principal, and Nick Dormer had not put a false colour on the matter in
speaking of his stall at the Theatre Francais as a sedative to his
ambition. Nick's inferiority in age to his cousin sat on him more
lightly than when they had been in their teens; and indeed no one can
very well be much older than a young man who has figured for a year,
however imperceptibly, in the House of Commons. Separation and diversity
had made them reciprocally strange enough to give a price to what they
shared; they were friends without being particular friends; that further
degree could always hang before them as a suitable but not oppressive
contingency, and they were both conscious that it was in their interest
to keep certain differences to "chaff" each other about--so possible was
it that they might have quarrelled if they had had everything in common.
Peter, as being wide-minded, was a little irritated to find his cousin
always so intensely British, while Nick Dormer made him the object of
the same compassionate criticism, recognised in him a rare knack with
foreign tongues, but reflected, and even with extravagance declared,
that it was a pity to have gone so far from home only to remain so
homely. Moreover, Nick had his ideas about the diplomatic mind, finding
in it, for his own sympathy, always the wrong turn. Dry, narrow, barren,
poor he pronounced it in familiar conversation with the clever
secretary; wanting in imagination, in generosity, in the finest
perceptions and the highest courage. This served as well as anything
else to keep the peace between them; it was a necessity of their
friendly intercourse that they should scuffle a little, and it scarcely
mattered what they scuffled about. Nick Dormer's express enjoyment of
Paris, the shop-windows on the quays, the old books on the parapet, the
gaiety of the river, the grandeur of the Louvre, every fine feature of
that prodigious face, struck his companion as a sign of insularity; the
appreciation of such things having become with Sherringham an
unconsci