"I don't care for his looks, but I should like his tips," Miriam liberally smiled. "And is he coming over to see you?" asked Sherringham, to whom, while this exchange of remarks, which he had not lost, was going on, Mrs. Rooth had in lowered accents addressed herself. "Not if I can help it I think!" But Mr. Lovick was so gaily rude that it wasn't embarrassing. "Oh sir, I'm sure you're fond of him," Mrs. Rooth remonstrated as the party passed together into the antechamber. "No, really, I like some of the others--four or five of them; but I don't like Arty." "We'll make it up to him, then; _we_'ll like him," Miriam answered with spirit; and her voice rang in the staircase--Sherringham attended them a little way--with a charm which her host had rather missed in her loudness of the day before. IX Nick Dormer found his friend Nash that evening at the place of their tryst--smoking a cigar, in the warm bright night, on the terrace of the cafe forming one of the angles of the Place de l'Opera. He sat down with him, but at the end of five minutes uttered a protest against the crush and confusion, the publicity and vulgarity of the place, the shuffling procession of the crowd, the jostle of fellow-customers, the perpetual brush of waiters. "Come away; I want to talk to you and I can't talk here. I don't care where we go. It will be pleasant to walk; well stroll away to the _quartiers serieux_. Each time I come to Paris I at the end of three days take the Boulevard, with its conventional grimace, into greater aversion. I hate even to cross it--I go half a mile round to avoid it."