drush to Bricket, to which estate
Percival Dormer had now succeeded, terminating the interchange a trifle
rudely by letting out that pleasant white house in the midlands--its
expropriated inhabitants, Lady Agnes and her daughters, adored it--to an
American reputed rich, who in the first flush of his sense of contrasts
considered that for twelve hundred a year he got it at a bargain.
Bricket had come to the late Sir Nicholas from his elder brother, dying
wifeless and childless. The new baronet, so different from his
father--though recalling at some points the uncle after whom he had
been named--that Nick had to make it up by cultivating conformity,
roamed about the world, taking shots which excited the enthusiasm of
society, when society heard of them, at the few legitimate creatures of
the chase the British rifle had up to that time spared. Lady Agnes
meanwhile settled with her girls in a gabled, latticed house in a
mentionable quarter, though it still required a little explaining, of
the temperate zone of London. It was not into her lap, poor woman, that
the revenues of Bricket were poured. There was no dower-house attached
to that moderate property, and the allowance with which the estate was
charged on her ladyship's behalf was not an incitement to grandeur.

Nick had a room under his mother's roof, which he mainly used to dress
for dinner when dining in Calcutta Gardens, and he had "kept on" his
chambers in the Temple; for to a young man in public life an independent
address was indispensable. Moreover, he was suspected of having a studio
in an out-of-the-way district, the indistinguishable parts of South
Kensington, incongruous as such a retreat might seem in the case of a
member of Parliament. It was an absurd place to see his constituents
unless he wanted to paint their portraits, a kind of "representation"
with which they would scarce have been satisfied; and in fact the only
question of portraiture had been when the wives and daughters of several
of them expressed a wish for the picture of their handsome young member.
Nick had not offered to paint it himself, and the studio was taken for
granted rather than much looked into by the ladies in Calcutta Gardens.
Too express a disposition to regard whims of this sort as extravagance
pure and simple was known by them to be open to correction; for they
were not oblivious that Mr. Carteret had humours which weighed against
them in the shape of convenient cheques nestlin