stess
notice that he would make each of them forgive everything to the other.
She returned that all her son had to forgive was her loving him more
than her life, and she would have challenged Peter, had he allowed it,
on the general ground of the comparative dignity of the two arts of
painting portraits and governing nations. Our friend declined the
challenge: the most he did was to intimate that he perhaps saw Nick more
vividly as a painter than as a governor. Later he remembered vaguely
something his aunt had said about their being a governing family.

He was going, by what he could ascertain, to a very queer climate and
had many preparations to make. He gave his best attention to these, and
for a couple of hours after leaving Lady Agnes rummaged London for books
from which he might extract information about his new habitat. It made
apparently no great figure in literature, and Peter could reflect that
he was perhaps destined to find a salutary distraction in himself
filling the void with a volume of impressions. After he had resigned
himself to necessary ignorance he went into the Park. He treated himself
to an afternoon or two there when he happened to drop upon London in
summer--it refreshed his sense of the British interests he would have to
stand up for. Moreover, he had been hiding more or less, and now all
that was changed and this was the simplest way not to hide. He met a
host of friends, made his situation as public as possible and accepted
on the spot a great many invitations; all subject, however, to the
mental reservation that he should allow none of them to interfere with
his being present the first night of Miriam's new venture. He was going
to the equator to get away from her, but to repudiate the past with some
decency of form he must show an affected interest, if he could muster
none other, in an occasion that meant so much for her. The least
intimate of her associates would do that, and Peter remembered how, at
the expense of good manners, he had stayed away from her first
appearance on any stage at all. He would have been shocked had he found
himself obliged to go back to Paris without giving her at the imminent
crisis the personal countenance she had so good a right to expect.

It was nearly eight o'clock when he went to Great Stanhope Street to
dress for dinner and learn that a note awaiting him on the hall-table
and which bore the marks of hasty despatch had come three or four hours
before. It