hen--as early as ten." She turned round, moving to
the door with him; but before they reached it she brought out: "Pray
isn't a gentleman to do anything, to be anything?"

"To be anything----?"

"If he doesn't aspire to serve the State."

"Aspire to make his political fortune, do you mean? Oh bless me, yes,
there are other things."

"What other things that can compare with that?"

"Well, I for instance, I'm very fond of the arts."

"Of the arts?" she echoed.

"Did you never hear of them? I'm awfully fond of painting."

At this Julia stopped short, and her fine grey eyes had for a moment the
air of being set further forward in her head. "Don't be odious!
Good-night," she said, turning away and leaving him to go.

BOOK SECOND

VII

Peter Sherringham reminded Nick the next day that he had promised to be
present at Madame Carre's interview with the ladies introduced to her by
Gabriel Nash; and in the afternoon, conformably to this arrangement, the
two men took their way to the Rue de Constantinople. They found Mr. Nash
and his friends in the small beflounced drawing-room of the old actress,
who, as they learned, had sent in a request for ten minutes' grace,
having been detained at a lesson--a rehearsal of the _comedie de salon_
about to be given for a charity by a fine lady, at which she had
consented to be present as an adviser. Mrs. Rooth sat on a black satin
sofa with her daughter beside her while Gabriel Nash, wandering about
the room, looked at the votive offerings which converted the little
panelled box, decorated in sallow white and gold, into a theatrical
museum: the presents, the portraits, the wreaths, the diadems, the
letters, framed and glazed, the trophies and tributes and relics
collected by Madame Carre during half a century of renown. The profusion
of this testimony was hardly more striking than the confession of
something missed, something hushed, which seemed to rise from it all and
make it melancholy, like a reference to clappings which, in the nature
of things, could now only be present as a silence: so that if the place
was full of history it was the form without the fact, or at the most a
redundancy of the one to a pinch of the other--the history of a mask,
of a squeak, of a series of vain gestures.

Some of the objects exhibited by the distinguished artist, her early
portraits, in lithograph or miniature, represented the costume and
embodied the manner of a period so remot