or not having kept his relations with
the actress, whatever they were, better from Julia's knowledge. He
remained indeed freshly surprised at the ardour with which she had
rested her hopes on Julia. Julia was certainly a combination--she was
accomplished, she was a sort of leading woman and she was rich; but
after all--putting aside what she might be to a man in love with
her--she was not the keystone of the universe. Yet the form in which the
consequences of his apostasy appeared most to come home to Lady Agnes
was the loss for the Dormer family of the advantages attached to the
possession of Mrs. Dallow. The larger mortification would round itself
later; for the hour the damning thing was that Nick had made that lady
the gift of an unforgivable grievance. He had clinched their separation
by his letter to his electors--and that above all was the wickedness of
the letter. Julia would have got over the other woman, but she would
never get over his becoming a nobody.

Lady Agnes challenged him upon this low prospect exactly as if he had
embraced it with the malignant purpose of making the return of his late
intended impossible. She contradicted her premises and lost her way in
her wrath. What had made him suddenly turn round if he had been in good
faith before? He had never been in good faith--never, never; he had had
from his earliest childhood the nastiest hankerings after a vulgar
little daubing, trash-talking life; they were not in him, the grander,
nobler aspirations--they never had been--and he had been anything but
honest to lead her on, to lead them all on, to think he would do
something: the fall and the shame would have been less for them if they
had come earlier. Moreover, what need under heaven had he to tell
Charles Carteret of the cruel folly on his very death-bed?--as if he
mightn't have let it all alone and accepted the benefit the old man was
so delighted to confer. No wonder Mr. Carteret would keep his money for
his heirs if that was the way Nick proposed to repay him; but where was
the common sense, where was the common charity, where was the common
decency of tormenting him with such vile news in his last hours? Was he
trying what he could invent that would break her heart, that would send
her in sorrow down to her grave? Weren't they all miserable enough and
hadn't he a ray of pity for his wretched sisters?

The relation of effect and cause, in regard to his sisters'
wretchedness, was but dimly disce