rmer declared he
would certainly become one--he was so well on the way to it; and
Sherringham, without heeding this charge, went on: "Let me add that,
considering you _are_ a painter, your portrait of the complicated Nash
is lamentably dim."

"He's not at all complicated; he's only too simple to give an account
of. Most people have a lot of attributes and appendages that dress them
up and superscribe them, and what I like Gabriel for is that he hasn't
any at all. It makes him, it keeps him, so refreshingly cool."

"By Jove, you match him there! Isn't it an appendage and an attribute to
escape kicking? How does he manage that?" Sherringham asked.

"I haven't the least idea--I don't know that he doesn't rouse the
kicking impulse. Besides, he can kick back and I don't think any one has
ever seen him duck or dodge. His means, his profession, his belongings
have never anything to do with the question. He doesn't shade off into
other people; he's as neat as an outline cut out of paper with scissors.
I like him, therefore, because in dealing with him you know what you've
got hold of. With most men you don't: to pick the flower you must break
off the whole dusty, thorny, worldly branch; you find you're taking up
in your grasp all sorts of other people and things, dangling accidents
and conditions. Poor Nash has none of those encumbrances: he's the
solitary-fragrant blossom."

"My dear fellow, you'd be better for a little of the same pruning!"
Sherringham retorted; and the young men continued their walk and their
gossip, jerking each other this way and that, punching each other here
and there, with an amicable roughness consequent on their having, been
boys together. Intimacy had reigned of old between the little
Sherringhams and the little Dormers, united in the country by ease of
neighbouring and by the fact that there was first cousinship, not
neglected, among the parents, Lady Agnes standing in this plastic
relation to Lady Windrush, the mother of Peter and Julia as well as of
other daughters and of a maturer youth who was to inherit, and who since
then had inherited, the ancient barony. Many things had altered later
on, but not the good reasons for not explaining. One of our young men
had gone to Eton and the other to Harrow--the scattered school on the
hill was the tradition of the Dormers--and the divergence had rather
taken its course in university years. Bricket, however, had remained
accessible to Windrush, and Win