im as a bore. The difficulty was that he
took for granted all kinds of positive assent, and Nick, in such
company, found himself steeped in an element of tacit pledges which
constituted the very medium of intercourse and yet made him draw his
breath a little in pain when for a moment he measured them. There would
have been no hypocrisy at all if he could have regarded Mr. Carteret as
a mere sweet spectacle, the last or almost the last illustration of a
departing tradition of manners. But he represented something more than
manners; he represented what he believed to be morals and ideas, ideas
as regards which he took your personal deference--not discovering how
natural that was--for participation. Nick liked to think that his
father, though ten years younger, had found it congruous to make his
best friend of the owner of so nice a nature: it gave a softness to his
feeling for that memory to be reminded that Sir Nicholas had been of the
same general type--a type so pure, so disinterested, so concerned for
the public good. Just so it endeared Mr. Carteret to him to perceive
that he considered his father had done a definite work, prematurely
interrupted, which had been an absolute benefit to the people of
England. The oddity was, however, that though both Mr. Carteret's aspect
and his appreciation were still so fresh this relation of his to his
late distinguished friend made the latter appear to Nick even more
irrecoverably dead. The good old man had almost a vocabulary of his own,
made up of old-fashioned political phrases and quite untainted with the
new terms, mostly borrowed from America; indeed his language and his
tone made those of almost any one who might be talking with him sound by
contrast rather American. He was, at least nowadays, never severe nor
denunciatory; but sometimes in telling an anecdote he dropped such an
expression as "the rascal said to me" or such an epithet as "the vulgar
dog."

Nick was always struck with the rare simplicity--it came out in his
countenance--of one who had lived so long and seen so much of affairs
that draw forth the passions and perversities of men. It often made him
say to himself that Mr. Carteret must have had many odd parts to have
been able to achieve with his means so many things requiring cleverness.
It was as if experience, though coming to him in abundance, had dealt
with him so clean-handedly as to leave no stain, and had moreover never
provoked him to any general refl