"That's your villainy. _C'est de l'exquis, du pur exquis_. Come, my dear fellow, this is very serious--it's a bad business," said Gabriel Nash. Then he added almost with austerity: "You'll be so good as to place before me every patch of paint, every sketch and scrap, that this room contains." Nick complied in great good humour. He turned out his boxes and drawers, shovelled forth the contents of bulging portfolios, mounted on chairs to unhook old canvases that had been severely "skied." He was modest and docile and patient and amused, above all he was quite thrilled--thrilled with the idea of eliciting a note of appreciation so late in the day. It was the oddest thing how he at present in fact found himself imputing value to his visitor--attributing to him, among attributions more confused, the dignity of judgement, the authority of knowledge. Nash was an ambiguous character but an excellent touchstone. The two said very little for a while, and they had almost half an hour's silence, during which, after our young man had hastily improvised an exhibition, there was only a puffing of cigarettes. Gabriel walked about, looking at this and that, taking up rough studies and laying them down, asking a question of fact, fishing with his umbrella, on the floor, amid a pile of unarranged sketches. Nick accepted jocosely the attitude of suspense, but there was even more of it in his heart than in his face. So few people had seen his young work--almost no one who really counted. He had been ashamed of it, never showing it to bring on a conclusion, since a conclusion was precisely what he feared. He whistled now while he let his companion take time. He rubbed old panels with his sleeve and dabbed wet sponges on surfaces that had sunk. It was a long time since he had felt so gay, strange as such an assertion sounds in regard to a young man whose bridal-day had at his urgent solicitation lately been fixed. He had stayed in town to be alone with his imagination, and suddenly, paradoxically, the sense of that result had arrived with poor Nash. "Nicholas Dormer," this personage remarked at last, "for grossness of immorality I think I've never seen your equal." "That sounds so well," Nick returned, "that I hesitate to risk spoiling it by wishing it explained." "Don't you recognise in _any_ degree the grand idea of duty?" "If I don't grasp it with a certain firmness I'm a deadly failure, for I was quite brought up on it," Nick said. "Then you're indeed the wretchedest failure I know. Life is ugly, after all." "Do I gather that you yourself recognise obligations of the order you allude to?" "Do you 'gather'?" Nash stared. "Why, aren't they the very flame of my faith, the burden of my song?" "My dear fellow, duty is doing, and I've inferred that you think rather poorly of doing--that it spoils one's style." "Doing wrong, assuredly." "But what do you call right? What's your canon of certainty there?" Nick asked.