ressed hard to her mouth, almost stuffed into it,
and her eyes were fixed on the floor. She made him aware he did
virtually know--know what towering piles of confidence and hope had been
dashed to the earth. Then she finished her sentence unexpectedly--"You
don't know what my life with my great husband was." Here on the other
hand Peter was slightly at fault--he didn't exactly see what her life
with her great husband had to do with it. What was clear to him,
however, was that they literally had looked for things all in the very
key of that greatness from Nick. It was not quite easy to see why this
had been the case--it had not been precisely Peter's own prefigurement.
Nick appeared to have had the faculty of planting that sort of
flattering faith in women; he had originally given Julia a tremendous
dose of it, though she had since shaken off the effects.

"Do you really think he would have done such great things, politically
speaking?" Peter risked. "Do you consider that the root of the matter
was so essentially in him?"

His hostess had a pause, looking at him rather hard. "I only think what
all his friends--all his father's friends--have thought. He was his
father's son after all. No young man ever had a finer training, and he
gave from the first repeated proof of the highest ability, the highest
ambition. See how he got in everywhere. Look at his first seat--look at
his second," Lady Agnes continued. "Look at what every one says at this
moment."

"Look at all the papers!" said Grace. "Did you ever hear him speak?" she
asked. And when Peter reminded her how he had spent his life in foreign
lands, shut out from such pleasures, she went on: "Well, you lost
something."

"It was very charming," said Lady Agnes quietly and poignantly.

"Of course he's charming, whatever he does," Peter returned. "He'll be a
charming artist."

"Oh God help us!" the poor lady groaned, rising quickly.

"He won't--that's the worst," Grace amended. "It isn't as if he'd do
things people would like, I've been to his place, and I never saw such a
horrid lot of things--not at all clever or pretty."

Yet her mother, at this, turned upon her with sudden asperity. "You know
nothing whatever about the matter!" Then she added for Peter that, as it
happened, her children did have a good deal of artistic taste: Grace was
the only one who was totally deficient in it. Biddy was very
clever--Biddy really might learn to do pretty things. And anything