one very far. He was glad he had not
himself a wronged mad mother, and he wondered how Nick could bear the
burden of the home he had ruined. Apparently he didn't bear it very far,
but had taken final, convenient refuge in Rosedale Road.

Peter's judgement of his perverse cousin was considerably confused, and
not the less so for the consciousness that he was perhaps just now not
in the best state of mind for judging him at all. At the same time,
though he held in general that a man of sense has always warrant enough
in his sense for doing the particular thing he prefers, he could
scarcely help asking himself whether, in the exercise of a virile
freedom, it had been absolutely indispensable Nick should work such
domestic woe. He admitted indeed that that was an anomalous figure for
Nick, the worker of domestic woe. Then he saw that his aunt's
grievance--there came a moment, later, when she asserted as much--was
not quite what her recreant child, in Balaklava Place, had represented
it--with questionable taste perhaps--to a mocking actress; was not a
mere shocked quarrel with his adoption of a "low" career, or a horror,
the old-fashioned horror, of the _louches_ licences taken by artists
under pretext of being conscientious: the day for this was past, and
English society thought the brush and the fiddle as good as anything
else--with two or three exceptions. It was not what he had taken up but
what he had put down that made the sorry difference, and the tragedy
would have been equally great if he had become a wine-merchant or a
horse-dealer. Peter had gathered at first that Lady Agnes wouldn't trust
herself to speak directly of her trouble, and he had obeyed what he
supposed the best discretion in making no allusion to it. But a few
minutes before they rose from table she broke out, and when he
attempted to utter a word of mitigation there was something that went to
his heart in the way she returned: "Oh you don't know--you don't know!"
He felt Grace's eyes fixed on him at this instant in a mystery of
supplication, and was uncertain as to what she wanted--that he should
say something more to console her mother or should hurry away from the
subject. Grace looked old and plain and--he had thought on coming
in--rather cross, but she evidently wanted something. "You don't know,"
Lady Agnes repeated with a trembling voice, "you don't know." She had
pushed her chair a little away from her place; she held her
pocket-handkerchief p