Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 3.djvu/207

Rh disagreeable to him to impose such a renunciation on Lady Agnes, and it was especially disagreeable to have to phrase it and discuss it and perhaps insist upon it. He would have liked the whole business to be tacit—a little triumph of silent delicacy. But he found reasons to suspect that what in fact would be most tacit was Julia's certain endurance of any chance indelicacy. Lady Agnes had a theory that they had virtually—"practically," as she said—given up the place, so that there was no need of making a splash about it; but Nick discovered, in the course of a conversation with Biddy more rigorous perhaps than any to which he had ever subjected her, that none of their property had been removed from her delightful house—none of the things (there were ever so many things) that Lady Agnes had caused to be conveyed there when they took possession. Her ladyship was the proprietor of innumerable articles of furniture, relics and survivals of her former greatness, and moved about the world with a train of heterogeneous baggage; so that her quiet overflow into the spaciousness of Broadwood had had all the luxury of a final subsidence. What Nick had to propose to her now was a dreadful combination, a relapse into all the things she most hated—seaside lodgings, bald storehouses in the Marylebone Road, little London rooms crammed with things that caught the dirt and made them stuffy. He was afraid he should really finish her, and he himself was surprised in a degree at his insistence. He wouldn't have supposed that he should have cared so much, but he found he did care intensely. He cared enough—it says everything—to explain to his mother that practically her retention of Broadwood would be the violation of an agreement. Julia had given them the place on