l as blind as
bats, and none the less happy for that. I'm a wanton variation, an
unaccountable monster. My dear father, rest his soul, went through life
without a suspicion that there's anything in it that can't be boiled
into blue-books, and became in that conviction a very distinguished
person. He brought me up in the same simplicity and in the hope of the
same eminence. It would have been better if I had remained so. I think
it's partly your fault that I haven't," Nick went on. "At Oxford you
were very bad company for me--my evil genius: you opened my eyes, you
communicated the poison. Since then, little by little, it has been
working within me; vaguely, covertly, insensibly at first, but during
the last year or two with violence, pertinacity, cruelty. I've resorted
to every antidote in life; but it's no use--I'm stricken. _C'est Venus
toute entiere a sa proie attachee_--putting Venus for 'art.' It tears me
to pieces as I may say."

"I see, I follow you," said Nash, who had listened to this recital with
radiant interest and curiosity. "And that's why you are going to stand."

"Precisely--it's an antidote. And at present you're another."

"Another?"

"That's why I jumped at you. A bigger dose of you may disagree with me
to that extent that I shall either die or get better."

"I shall control the dilution," said Nash. "Poor fellow--if you're
elected!" he added.

"Poor fellow either way. You don't know the atmosphere in which I live,
the horror, the scandal my apostasy would provoke, the injury and
suffering it would inflict. I believe it would really kill my mother.
She thinks my father's watching me from the skies."

"Jolly to make him jump!" Nash suggested.

"He'd jump indeed--come straight down on top of me. And then the
grotesqueness of it--to _begin_ all of a sudden at my age."

"It's perfect indeed, it's too lovely a case," Nash raved.

"Think how it sounds--a paragraph in the London papers: 'Mr. Nicholas
Dormer, M. P. for Harsh and son of the late Right Honourable and so
forth and so forth, is about to give up his seat and withdraw from
public life in order to devote himself to the practice of
portrait-painting--and with the more commendable perseverance by reason
of all the dreadful time he has lost. Orders, in view of this,
respectfully solicited.'"

"The nineteenth century's a sweeter time than I thought," said Nash.
"It's the portrait then that haunts your dreams?"

"I wish you could see. You