"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 must of course come immediately to my place in London."