child this time?" he asked of his hostess as soon as he
was seated near her.

"Why do you say 'this time' as if it were different from any other
time?" she replied as she gave him his tea.

"Only because, as the months and the years elapse, it's more and more
of a wonder, whenever I don't see her, to think what she does with
herself--or what you do with her. What it does show, I suppose," Mr.
Mitchett went on, "is that she takes no trouble to meet me."

"My dear Mitchy," said Mrs. Brookenham, "what do YOU know about
'trouble'--either poor Nanda's or mine or anybody's else? You've never
had to take any in your life, you're the spoiled child of fortune
and you skim over the surface of things in a way that seems often to
represent you as supposing everybody else has wings. Most other people
are sticking fast in their native mud."

"Mud, Mrs. Brook--mud, mud!" he protestingly cried as, while he watched
his fellow visitor move to a distance with their host, he glanced about
the room, taking in afresh the Louis Seize secretary which looked better
closed than open and for which he always had a knowing eye. "Remarkably
charming--mud!"

"Well, that's what a great deal of the element really appears to-day to
be thought; and precisely as a specimen, Mitchy dear, those two French
books you were so good as to send me and which--really this time, you
extraordinary man!" She fell back, intimately reproachful, from the
effect produced on her, renouncing all expression save that of the
rolled eye.

"Why, were they particularly dreadful?"--Mitchy was honestly surprised.
"I rather liked the one in the pink cover--what's the confounded thing
called?--I thought it had a sort of a something-or-other." He had cast
his eye about as if for a glimpse of the forgotten title, and she caught
the question as he vaguely and good-humouredly dropped it.

"A kind of a morbid modernity? There IS that," she dimly conceded.

"Is that what they call it? Awfully good name. You must have got it from
old Van!" he gaily declared.

"I dare say I did. I get the good things from him and the bad ones from
you. But you're not to suppose," Mrs. Brookenham went on, "that I've
discussed your horrible book with him."

"Come, I say!" Mr. Mitchett protested; "I've seen you with books from
Vanderbank which if you HAVE discussed them with him--well," he laughed,
"I should like to have been there!"

"You haven't seen me with anything like yours--no, no, never, n