t was clear to him he liked particular possibilities that,
on the occasion of a constituency's holding out a cordial hand to him
while it extended another in a different direction, a certain bloom of
boyhood that was on him had not paled at the idea of a match.

He had risen to the fray as he had risen to matches at school, for his
boyishness could still take a pleasure in an inconsiderate show of
agility. He could meet electors and conciliate bores and compliment
women and answer questions and roll off speeches and chaff
adversaries--he could do these things because it was amusing and
slightly dangerous, like playing football or ascending an Alp, pastimes
for which nature had conferred on him an aptitude not so very different
in kind from a due volubility on platforms. There were two voices to
admonish him that all this was not really action at all, but only a
pusillanimous imitation of it: one of them fitfully audible in the
depths of his own spirit and the other speaking, in the equivocal
accents of a very crabbed hand, from a letter of four pages by Gabriel
Nash. However, Nick carried the imitation as far as possible, and the
flood of sound floated him. What more could a working faith have done?
He had not broken with the axiom that in a case of doubt one should hold
off, for this applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest
pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was
doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it and that if
there was a hard knot in his life it would only grow harder with
keeping. Doing one's sum to-morrow instead of to-day doesn't make the
sum easier, but at least makes to-day so.

Sometimes in the course of the following fortnight it seemed to him he
had gone in for Harsh because he was sure he should lose; sometimes he
foresaw that he should win precisely to punish him for having tried and
for his want of candour; and when presently he did win he was almost
scared at his success. Then it appeared to him he had done something
even worse than not choose--he had let others choose for him. The beauty
of it was that they had chosen with only their own object in their eye,
for what did they know about his strange alternative? He was rattled
about so for a fortnight--Julia taking care of this--that he had no time
to think save when he tried to remember a quotation or an American
story, and all his life became an overflow of verbiage. Thought couldn't
h