friend, I know everything--she has told
me only _her_ side, but I'm so competent that I know yours too--and I
enter into the whole thing deeply. But it would be as much as my place
is worth to accommodate you." Still, she didn't go so far as to give him
an inkling of what he learned on the third day and what he had not gone
so far as to suspect--that the two ladies had made rapid arrangements
for a scheme of foreign travel. These arrangements had already been
carried out when, at the door of the house in Great Stanhope Street, the
announcement was made him that the subtle creatures had started that
morning for Paris.

XXVIII

They spent on their way to Florence several days in Paris, where Peter
Sherringham had as much free talk with his sister as it often befell one
member of their family to have with another. He enjoyed, that is, on two
different occasions, half an hour's gossip with her in her sitting-room
at the hotel. On one of these he took the liberty of asking her whether
or no, decidedly, she meant to marry Nick Dormer. Julia expressed to him
that she appreciated his curiosity, but that Nick and she were nothing
more than relations and good friends. "He tremendously wants it," Peter
none the less observed; to which she simply made answer, "Well then, he
may want!"

After this, for a while, they sat as silent as if the subject had been
quite threshed out between them. Peter felt no impulse to penetrate
further, for it was not a habit of the Sherringhams to talk with each
other of their love-affairs; and he was conscious of the particular
deterrent that he and Julia entertained in general such different
sentiments that they could never go far together in discussion. He liked
her and was sorry for her, thought her life lonely and wondered she
didn't make a "great" marriage. Moreover he pitied her for being without
the interests and consolations he himself had found substantial: those
of the intellectual, the studious order he considered these to be, not
knowing how much she supposed she reflected and studied and what an
education she had found in her political aspirations, viewed by him as
scarce more a personal part of her than the livery of her servants or
the jewels George Dallow's money had bought. Her relations with Nick
struck him as queer, but were fortunately none of his business. No
business of Julia's was sufficiently his to justify him in an attempt to
understand it. That there should have be