y) might be freely left to Gabriel Nash. He laid the
weight of explanation on his commentators, meeting them all on the firm
ground of his own amusement. He saw he should live for months in a thick
cloud of irony, not the finest air of the season, and he adopted the
weapon to which a person whose use of tobacco is only occasional resorts
when every one else produces a cigar--he puffed the spasmodic, defensive
cigarette. He accepted as to what he had done the postulate of the
obscurely tortuous, abounding so in that sense that his critics were
themselves bewildered. Some of them felt that they got, as the phrase
is, little out of him--he rose in his good humour so much higher than
the "rise" they had looked for--on his very first encounter with the
world after his scrimmage with his mother. He went to a dinner-party--he
had accepted the invitation many days before--having seen his
resignation, in the form of a telegram from Harsh, announced in the
evening papers. The people he found there had seen it as well, and the
wittiest wanted to know what he was now going to do. Even the most
embarrassed asked if it were true he had changed his politics. He gave
different answers to different persons, but left most of them under the
impression that he had strange scruples of conscience. This, however,
was not a formidable occasion, for there had happened to be no one
present he would have desired, on the old basis, especially to gratify.
There were real good friends it would be less easy to meet--Nick was
almost sorry for an hour that he had so many real good friends. If he
had had more enemies the case would have been simpler, and he was fully
aware that the hardest thing of all would be to be let off too easily.
Then he would appear to himself to have been put, all round, on his
generosity, and his deviation would thus wear its ugliest face.

When he left the place at which he had been dining he betook himself to
Rosedale Road: he saw no reason why he should go down to the House,
though he knew he had not done with that yet. He had a dread of behaving
as if he supposed he should be expected to make a farewell speech, and
was thankful his eminence was not of a nature to create on such an
occasion a demand for his oratory. He had in fact nothing whatever to
say in public--not a vain word, not a sorry syllable. Though the hour
was late he found Gabriel Nash established in his studio, drawn thither
by the fine exhilaration of having