nd should be
occupied with parliamentary work than only occupied in talking it over
with him. Talking it over, however, was the next best thing, as on the
morrow, after breakfast, Mr. Carteret showed Nick he considered. They
sat in the garden, the morning being warm, and the old man had a table
beside him covered with the letters and newspapers the post had poured
forth. He was proud of his correspondence, which was altogether on
public affairs, and proud in a manner of the fact that he now dictated
almost everything. That had more in it of the statesman in retirement, a
character indeed not consciously assumed by Mr. Carteret, but always
tacitly attributed to him by Nick, who took it rather from the pictorial
point of view--remembering on each occasion only afterwards that though
he was in retirement he had not exactly been a statesman. A young man, a
very sharp, handy young man, came every morning at ten o'clock and wrote
for him till luncheon. The young man had a holiday to-day in honour of
Nick's visit--a fact the mention of which led Nick to make some not
particularly sincere speech about _his_ being ready to write anything
if Mr. Carteret were at all pressed.

"Ah but your own budget--what will become of that?" the old gentleman
objected, glancing at Nick's pockets as if rather surprised not to see
them stuffed out with documents in split envelopes. His visitor had to
confess that he had not directed his letters to meet him at Beauclere:
he should find them in town that afternoon. This led to a little homily
from Mr. Carteret which made him feel quite guilty; there was such an
implication of neglected duty in the way the old man said, "You won't do
them justice--you won't do them justice." He talked for ten minutes, in
his rich, simple, urbane way, about the fatal consequences of getting
behind. It was his favourite doctrine that one should always be a little
before, and his own eminently regular respiration seemed to illustrate
the idea. A man was certainly before who had so much in his rear.

This led to the bestowal of a good deal of general advice on the
mistakes to avoid at the beginning of a parliamentary career--as to
which Mr. Carteret spoke with the experience of one who had sat for
fifty years in the House of Commons. Nick was amused, but also mystified
and even a little irritated, by his talk: it was founded on the idea of
observation and yet our young man couldn't at all regard him as an
observer. "He