This led to the bestowal of a good deal of general advice on the mistakes to avoid at the beginning of a parliamentary career--as to which Mr. Carteret spoke with the experience of one who had sat for fifty years in the House of Commons. Nick was amused, but also mystified and even a little irritated, by his talk: it was founded on the idea of observation and yet our young man couldn't at all regard him as an observer. "He doesn't observe _me_," he said to himself; "if he did he would see, he wouldn't think----!" The end of this private cogitation was a vague impatience of all the things his venerable host took for granted. He didn't see any of the things Nick saw. Some of these latter were the light touches the summer morning scattered through the sweet old garden. The time passed there a good deal as if it were sitting still with a plaid under its feet while Mr. Carteret distilled a little more of the wisdom he had laid up in his fifty years. This immense term had something fabulous and monstrous for Nick, who wondered whether it were the sort of thing his companion supposed _he_ had gone in for. It was not strange Mr. Carteret should be different; he might originally have been more--well, to himself Nick was not obliged to phrase it: what our young man meant was more of what it was perceptible to him that his old friend was not. Should even he, Nick, be like that at the end of fifty years? What Mr. Carteret was so good as to expect for him was that he should be much more distinguished; and wouldn't this exactly mean much more like that? Of course Nick heard some things he had heard before; as for instance the circumstances that had originally led the old man to settle at Beauclere. He had been returned for that borough--it was his second seat--in years far remote, and had come to live there because he then had a conscientious conviction, modified indeed by later experience, that a member should be constantly resident. He spoke of this now, smiling rosily, as he might have spoken of some wild aberration of his youth; yet he called Nick's attention to the fact that he still so far clung to his conviction as to hold--though of what might be urged on the other side he was perfectly aware--that a representative should at least be as resident as possible. This gave Nick an opening for something that had been on and off his lips all the morning. "According to that I ought to take up my abode at Harsh." "In the measure of the convenient I shouldn't be sorry to see you do it." "It ought to be rather convenient," Nick largely smiled. "I've got a piece of news for you which I've kept, as one keeps that sort of thing--for it's very good--till the last." He waited a little to see if Mr. Carteret would guess, and at first thought nothing would come of this. But after resting his young-looking eyes on him for a moment the old man said: "I should indeed be very happy to hear that you've arranged to take a wife."