Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/134

126 there was only a puffing of cigarettes. The visitor walked about, looking at this and that, taking up rough studies and laying them down, asking a question of fact, fishing with his umbrella, on the floor, amid a pile of unarranged sketches. Nick accepted jocosely the attitude of suspense, but there was even more of it in his heart than in his face. So few people had seen his young work—almost no one who really counted. He had been ashamed of it, never showing it to bring on a conclusion, inasmuch as it was precisely of a conclusion that he was afraid. He whistled now while he let his companion take time. He rubbed old panels with his sleeve and dabbed wet sponges on surfaces that had sunk. It was a long time since he had felt so gay, strange as such an assertion sounds in regard to a young man whose bridal day had at his urgent solicitation lately been fixed. He had stayed in town to be alone with his imagination, and suddenly, paradoxically, the sense of that result had arrived with Gabriel Nash.

"Nicholas Dormer," this personage remarked at last, "for grossness of immorality I think I have never seen your equal."

"That sounds so well that I hesitate to risk spoiling it by wishing it explained."

"Don't you recognize in any degree the elevated idea of duty?"

"If I don't grasp it with a certain firmness I'm a great failure, for I was quite brought up in it," Nick said.

"Then you are the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after all."