Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/137

Rh "And you haven't, alas; that's the pity of it, that's the scandal. That's the wrong I want to set right, before it becomes too public a shame. I called you just now grossly immoral, on account of the spectacle you present—a spectacle to be hidden from the eye of ingenuous youth: that of a man neglecting his own fiddle to blunder away on that of one of his fellows. We can't afford such mistakes, we can't tolerate such license."

"You think then I have a fiddle?" asked Nick.

"A regular Stradivarius 1 All these things you have shown me are singularly interesting. You have a talent of a wonderfully pure strain."

"I say—I say—I say!" Nick exclaimed, standing in front of his visitor with his hands in his pockets and a blush on his smiling face, and repeating with a change of accent Nash's exclamation of half an hour before.

"I like it, your talent; I measure it, I appreciate it, I insist upon it," Nash went on, between the whiffs of his cigarette. "I have to be accomplished to do so, but fortunately I am. In such a case that's my duty. I shall make you my business for a while. Therefore," Nash added, piously, "don't say I'm unconscious of the moral law."

"A Stradivarius?" said Nick, interrogatively, with his eyes wide open and the thought in his mind of how different this was from having gone to Griffin.