"It's you then who are lucky to have money."
"I haven't," Nick explained. "My expenses are to be paid."
"Then you too must think of 'people.'"
Nick made no answer to this, but after a moment said: "I wish very much you had more to show for it."
"To show for what?"
"Your little system—the æsthetic life."
Nash hesitated, tolerantly, gaily, as he often did, with an air of being embarrassed to choose between several answers, any one of which would be so right. "Oh having something to show's such a poor business. It's a kind of confession of failure."
"Yes, you're more affected than anything else," said Nick impatiently.
"No, my dear boy, I'm more good-natured: don't I prove it? I'm rather disappointed to find you not more accessible to esoteric doctrine. But there is, I confess, another plane of intelligence, honourable, and very honourable, in its way, from which it may legitimately appear important to have something to show. If you must confine yourself to that plane I won't refuse you my sympathy. After all that's what I have to show! But the degree of my sympathy must of course depend on the nature of the demonstration you wish to make."
"You know it very well—you've guessed it," Nick returned, looking before him in a conscious, modest way which would have been called sheepish had he been a few years younger.