r volume of her utterance it was still
highly agreeable to see her at home, for it was there the strictly
mimetic gift he freely conceded to her came out most. He spoke as if she
had been formed by the bounty of nature to be his particular recreation,
and as if, being an expert in innocent joys, he took his pleasure
wherever he found it.

He was perpetually in the field, sociable, amiable, communicative,
inveterately contradicted but never confounded, ready to talk to any one
about anything and making disagreement--of which he left the
responsibility wholly to others--a basis of harmony. Every one knew what
he thought of the theatrical profession, and yet who could say he didn't
regard, its members as embodiments of comedy when he touched with such a
hand the spring of their foibles?--touched it with an art that made even
Peter laugh, notwithstanding his attitude of reserve where this
interloper was concerned. At any rate, though he had committed himself
as to their general fatuity he put up with their company, for the sake
of Miriam's vocal vibrations, with a practical philosophy that was all
his own. And she frankly took him for her supreme, her incorrigible
adorer, masquerading as a critic to save his vanity and tolerated for
his secret constancy in spite of being a bore. He was meanwhile really
not a bore to Peter, who failed of the luxury of being able to regard
him as one. He had seen too many strange countries and curious things,
observed and explored too much, to be void of illustration. Peter had a
sense that if he himself was in the _grandes espaces_ Gabriel had
probably, as a finer critic, a still wider range. If among Miriam's
associates Mr. Dashwood dragged him down, the other main sharer of his
privilege challenged him rather to higher and more fantastic flights. If
he saw the girl in larger relations than the young actor, who mainly saw
her in ill-written parts, Nash went a step further and regarded her,
irresponsibly and sublimely, as a priestess of harmony, a figure with
which the vulgar ideas of success and failure had nothing to do. He
laughed at her "parts," holding that without them she would still be
great. Peter envied him his power to content himself with the pleasures
he could get; Peter had a shrewd impression that contentment wouldn't be
the final sweetener of his own repast.

Above all Nash held his attention by a constant element of easy
reference to Nick Dormer, who, as we know, had sudden