f a
kind that opposed no difficulty whatever to her not liking, in case of
such a complication, a person attached or otherwise belonging to him. It
was not in her nature to "put up" with others for the sake of an
individual she loved: the putting up was usually consumed in the loving,
and with nothing left over. If the affection that isolates and
simplifies its object may be distinguished from the affection that seeks
communications and contracts for it, Julia Dallow's was quite of the
encircling, not to say the narrowing sort. She was not so much jealous
as essentially exclusive. She desired no experience for the familiar and
yet partly unsounded kinsman in whom she took an interest that she
wouldn't have desired for herself; and indeed the cause of her interest
in him was partly the vision of his helping her to the particular
extensions she did desire--the taste and thrill of great affairs and of
public action. To have such ambitions for him appeared to her the
highest honour she could do him; her conscience was in it as well as her
inclination, and her scheme, to her sense, was noble enough to varnish
over any disdain she might feel for forces drawing him another way. She
had a prejudice, in general, against his existing connexions, a
suspicion of them, and a supply of off-hand contempt in waiting. It was
a singular circumstance that she was sceptical even when, knowing her as
well as he did, he thought them worth recommending to her: the
recommendation indeed mostly confirmed the suspicion.

This was a law from which Gabriel Nash was condemned to suffer, if
suffering could on any occasion be predicated of Gabriel Nash. His
pretension was in truth that he had purged his life of such
possibilities of waste, though probably he would have admitted that if
that fair vessel should spring a leak the wound in its side would have
been dealt by a woman's hand. In dining two evenings before with her
brother and with the Dormers Mrs. Dallow had been moved to exclaim that
Peter and Nick knew the most extraordinary people. As regards Peter the
attitudinising girl and her mother now pointed that moral with
sufficient vividness; so that there was little arrogance in taking a
similar quality for granted of the conceited man at her elbow, who sat
there as if he might be capable from one moment to another of leaning
over the arm of her sofa. She had not the slightest wish to talk with
him about himself, and was afraid for an instant t