uld give him two or three hours--or rather she would herself ask for
them--if he didn't positively turn her from the door.

It had not been definite to Nick that he wanted another sitting at all
for the slight work, as he held it to be, that Miriam had already helped
him to achieve. He regarded this work as a mere light wind-fall of the
shaken tree: he had made what he could of it and would have been
embarrassed to make more. If it was not finished this was because it was
not finishable; at any rate he had said all he had to say in that
particular phrase. The young man, in truth, was not just now in the
highest spirits; his imagination had within two or three days become
conscious of a check that he tried to explain by the idea of a natural
reaction. Any decision or violent turn, any need of a new sharp choice
in one's career, was upsetting, and, exaggerate that importance and
one's own as little as one would, a deal of flurry couldn't help
attending, especially in the face of so much scandal, the horrid act,
odious to one's modesty at the best, of changing one's clothes in the
marketplace. That made life not at all positively pleasant, yet
decidedly thrilling, for the hour; and it was well enough till the
thrill abated. When this occurred, as it inevitably would, the romance
and the glow of the adventure were exchanged for the chill and the
prose. It was to these latter elements he had waked up pretty wide on
this particular morning; and the prospect was not appreciably fresher
from the fact that he had warned himself in advance it would be dull. He
had in fact known how dull it would be, but now he would have time to
learn even better. A reaction was a reaction, but it was not after all a
catastrophe. It would be a feature of his very freedom that he should
ask himself if he hadn't made a great mistake; this privilege would
doubtless even remain within the limits of its nature in exposing him to
hours of intimate conviction of his madness. But he would live to
retract his retractations--this was the first thing to bear in mind.

He was absorbed, even while he dressed, in the effort to achieve
intelligibly to himself some such revolution when, by the first post,
Miriam's note arrived. At first it did little to help his agility--it
made him, seeing her esthetic faith as so much stronger and simpler than
his own, wonder how he should keep with her at her high level. Ambition,
in her, was always on the rush, and she was n