g. You've a talent of a wonderfully pure strain."

"I say--I say--I say!" Nick exclaimed, hovering there with his hands in
his pockets and a blush on his lighted face, while he repeated with a
change of accent Nash's exclamation of half an hour before.

"I like it, your talent; I measure it, I appreciate it, I insist upon
it," that critic went on between the whiffs of his cigarette. "I have to
be awfully wise and good to do so, but fortunately I am. In such a case
that's my duty. I shall make you my business for a while. Therefore," he
added piously; "don't say I'm unconscious of the moral law."

"A Stradivarius?" said Nick interrogatively and with his eyes wide open.
The thought in his mind was of how different this seemed from his having
gone to Griffin.

XXIV

His counsellor had plenty of further opportunity to develop this and
other figurative remarks, for he not only spent several of the middle
hours of the day at the studio, but came back in the evening--the pair
had dined together at a little foreign pothouse in Soho, revealed to
Nick on this occasion--and discussed the great question far into the
night. The great question was whether, on the showing of those examples
of his ability with which the scene of their discourse was now densely
bestrewn, Nick Dormer would be justified in "really going in" for the
practice of pictorial art. This may strike many readers of his history
as a limited and even trivial inquiry, with little of the heroic or the
romantic in it; but it was none the less carried to the finest point by
our impassioned young men. Nick suspected Nash of exaggerating his
encouragement in order to play a malign trick on the political world at
whose expense it was his fond fancy to divert himself--without indeed
making that organisation perceptibly totter--and reminded him that his
present accusation of immorality was strangely inconsistent with the
wanton hope expressed by him in Paris, the hope that the Liberal
candidate at Harsh would be returned. Nash replied, first, "Oh I hadn't
been in this place then!" but he defended himself later and more
effectually by saying that it was not of Nick's having got elected he
complained: it was of his visible hesitancy to throw up his seat. Nick
begged that he wouldn't mention this, and his gallantry failed to render
him incapable of saying: "The fact is I haven't the nerve for it." They
talked then for a while of what he _could_ do, not of what he co