ear itself for the noise, which had to be pleasant and persuasive, had
to hang more or less together, without its aid. Nick was surprised at
the airs he could play, and often when, the last thing at night, he shut
the door of his room, found himself privately exclaiming that he had had
no idea he was such a mountebank.

I must add that if this reflexion didn't occupy him long, and if no
meditation, after his return from Paris, held him for many moments,
there was a reason better even than that he was tired, that he was busy,
that he appreciated the coincidence of the hit and the hurrah, the
hurrah and the hit. That reason was simply Mrs. Dallow, who had suddenly
become a still larger fact in his consciousness than his having turned
actively political. She _was_ indeed his being so--in the sense that if
the politics were his, how little soever, the activity was hers. She had
better ways of showing she was clever than merely saying clever
things--which in general only prove at the most that one would be clever
if one could. The accomplished fact itself was almost always the
demonstration that Mrs. Dallow could; and when Nick came to his senses
after the proclamation of the victor and the drop of the uproar her
figure was, of the whole violent dance of shadows, the only thing that
came back, that stayed. She had been there at each of the moments,
passing, repassing, returning, before him, beside him, behind him. She
had made the business infinitely prettier than it would have been
without her, added music and flowers and ices, a finer charm, converting
it into a kind of heroic "function," the form of sport most dangerous.
It had been a garden-party, say, with one's life at stake from pressure
of the crowd. The concluded affair had bequeathed him thus not only a
seat in the House of Commons, but a perception of what may come of women
in high embodiments and an abyss of intimacy with one woman in
particular.

She had wrapped him up in something, he didn't know what--a sense of
facility, an overpowering fragrance--and they had moved together in an
immense fraternity. There had been no love-making, no contact that was
only personal, no vulgarity of flirtation: the hurry of the days and the
sharpness with which they both tended to an outside object had made all
that irrelevant. It was as if she had been too near for him to see her
separate from himself; but none the less, when he now drew breath and
looked back, what had happe