little story of the forfeiture of his "expectations" from Mr. Carteret.
He showed her this time not only the face of the matter, but what lay
below it; narrated briefly the incident in his studio which had led to
Julia Dallow's deciding she couldn't after all put up with him. This was
wholly new to Lady Agnes, she had had no clue to it, and he could
instantly see how it made the event worse for her, adding a hideous
positive to an abominable negative. He noted now that, distressed and
distracted as she had been by his rupture with Julia, she had still held
to the faith that their engagement would come on again; believing
evidently that he had a personal empire over the mistress of Harsh which
would bring her back. Lady Agnes was forced to recognise this empire as
precarious, to forswear the hope of a blessed renewal from the moment
the question was of base infatuations on his own part. Nick confessed to
an infatuation, but did his best to show her it wasn't base; that it
wasn't--since Julia had had faith in his loyalty--for the person of the
young lady who had been discovered posturing to him and whom he had seen
but half-a-dozen times in his life. He endeavoured to recall to his
mother the identity of this young lady, he adverted to the occasion in
Paris when they all had seen her together. But Lady Agnes's mind and
memory were a blank on the subject of Miss Miriam Rooth and she wanted
to hear nothing whatever about her: it was enough that she was the cause
of their ruin and a part of his pitiless folly. She needed to know
nothing of her to allude to her as if it were superfluous to give a
definite name to the class to which she belonged.

But she gave a name to the group in which Nick had now taken his place,
and it made him feel after the lapse of years like a small, scolded,
sorry boy again; for it was so far away he could scarcely remember
it--besides there having been but a moment or two of that sort in his
happy childhood--the time when this parent had slapped him and called
him a little fool. He was a big fool now--hugely immeasurable; she
repeated the term over and over with high-pitched passion. The most
painful thing in this painful hour was perhaps his glimpse of the
strange feminine cynicism that lurked in her fine sense of injury. Where
there was such a complexity of revolt it would have been difficult to
pick out particular wrongs; but Nick could see that, to his mother's
imagination, he was most a fool f