uldn't;
of the mysteries and miracles of reproduction and representation; of the
strong, sane joys of the artistic life. Nick made afresh, with more
fulness, his great confession, that his private ideal of happiness was
the life of a great painter of portraits. He uttered his thought on that
head so copiously and lucidly that Nash's own abundance was stilled and
he listened almost as if he had been listening to something
new--difficult as it was to conceive a point of view for such a matter
with which he was unacquainted.

"There it is," said Nick at last--"there's the naked, preposterous
truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years
reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals.
I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find
fascination and a measure of success in it--out of the din and the dust
and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains
and party treacheries: of humbuggery, hypocrisy and cant. The cleanness
and quietness of it, the independent effort to do something, to leave
something which shall give joy to man long after the howling has died
away to the last ghost of an echo--such a vision solicits me in the
watches of night with an almost irresistible force."

As he dropped these remarks he lolled on a big divan with one of his
long legs folded up, while his visitor stopped in front of him after
moving about the room vaguely and softly, almost on tiptoe, so as not to
interrupt him. "You speak," Nash said, "with the special and dreadful
eloquence that rises to a man's lips when he has practically, whatever
his theory may be, renounced the right and dropped hideously into the
wrong. Then his regret for the right, a certain exquisite appreciation
of it, puts on an accent I know well how to recognise."

Nick looked up at him a moment. "You've hit it if you mean by that that
I haven't resigned my seat and that I don't intend to."

"I thought you took it only to give it up. Don't you remember our talk
in Paris?"

"I like to be a part of the spectacle that amuses you," Nick returned,
"but I could scarcely have taken so much trouble as that for it."

"Isn't it then an absurd comedy, the life you lead?"

"Comedy or tragedy--I don't know which; whatever it is I appear to be
capable of it to please two or three people."

"Then you _can_ take trouble?" said Nash.

"Yes, for the woman I'm to marry."

"Oh you're to