, familiarly he turned about. "And
where's Nanda?"

"Oh SHE doesn't help--she attracts rather the worst of the bogies.
Edward and Nanda and Harold and I seated together are fairly a case for
that--what do you call it?--investigating Society. Deprived of the sweet
resource of the Hovel," Mrs. Brook continued, "we shall each, from about
the tenth on, forage somehow or other for ourselves. Mitchy perhaps,"
she added, "will insist on taking us to Baireuth."

"That will be the form, you mean, of his own forage?"

Mrs. Brook just hesitated. "Unless you should prefer to take it as the
form of yours."

Vanderbank appeared for a moment obligingly enough to turn this over,
but with the effect of noting an objection. "Oh I'm afraid I shall have
to grind straight through the month and that by the time I'm free every
Ring at Baireuth will certainly have been rung. Is it your idea to take
Nanda?" he asked.

She reached out for another cushion. "If it's impossible for you to
manage what I suggest why should that question interest you?"

"My dear woman"--and her visitor dropped into a chair--"do you suppose
my interest depends on such poverties as what I can 'manage'? You know
well enough," he went on in another tone, "why I care for Nanda and
enquire about her."

She was perfectly ready. "I know it, but only as a bad reason. Don't be
too sure!"

For a moment they looked at each other. "Don't be so sure, you mean,
that the elation of it may go to my head? Are you really warning me
against vanity?"

"Your 'reallys,' my dear Van, are a little formidable, but it strikes
me that before I tell you there's something I've a right to ask. Are you
'really' what they call thinking of my daughter?"

"Your asking," Vanderbank returned, "exactly shows the state of your
knowledge of the matter. I don't quite see moreover why you speak as if
I were paying an abrupt and unnatural attention. What have I done the
last three months but talk to you about her? What have you done but talk
to ME about her? From the moment you first spoke to me--'monstrously,'
I remember you called it--of the difference made in your social life by
her finally established, her perpetual, her inexorable participation:
from that moment what have we both done but put our heads together over
the question of keeping the place tidy, as you called it--or as _I_
called it, was it?--for the young female mind?"

Mrs. Brook faced serenely enough the directness of this chall