a
part of the complicated ingenious machinery. As I say, I keep to the
simplest way. I find that gives one enough to do. Merely to be is such a
_metier_; to live such an art; to feel such a career!"

Bridget Dormer turned her back and examined her statue, and her brother
said to his old friend: "And to write?"

"To write? Oh I shall never do it again!"

"You've done it almost well enough to be inconsistent. That book of
yours is anything but negative; it's complicated and ingenious."

"My dear fellow, I'm extremely ashamed of that book," said Gabriel Nash.

"Ah call yourself a bloated Buddhist and have done with it!" his
companion exclaimed.

"Have done with it? I haven't the least desire to have done with it. And
why should one call one's self anything? One only deprives other people
of their dearest occupation. Let me add that you don't _begin_ to have
an insight into the art of life till it ceases to be of the smallest
consequence to you what you may be called. That's rudimentary."

"But if you go in for shades you must also go in for names. You must
distinguish," Nick objected. "The observer's nothing without his
categories, his types and varieties."

"Ah trust him to distinguish!" said Gabriel Nash sweetly. "That's for
his own convenience; he has, privately, a terminology to meet it. That's
one's style. But from the moment it's for the convenience of others the
signs have to be grosser, the shades begin to go. That's a deplorable
hour! Literature, you see, is for the convenience of others. It requires
the most abject concessions. It plays such mischief with one's style
that really I've had to give it up."

"And politics?" Nick asked.

"Well, what about them?" was Mr. Nash's reply with a special cadence as
he watched his friend's sister, who was still examining her statue.
Biddy was divided between irritation and curiosity. She had interposed
space, but she had not gone beyond ear-shot. Nick's question made her
curiosity throb as a rejoinder to his friend's words.

"That, no doubt you'll say, is still far more for the convenience of
others--is still worse for one's style."

Biddy turned round in time to hear Mr. Nash answer: "It has simply
nothing in life to do with shades! I can't say worse for it than that."

Biddy stepped nearer at this and drew still further on her courage.
"Won't mamma be waiting? Oughtn't we to go to luncheon?"

Both the young men looked up at her and Mr. Nash broke out: "You o