Vanderbank, still more at his ease now and with his head back, had
his eyes aloft and far. "Oh there are things in Nanda--!" The others
exchanged a glance at this, while their companion added: "Little Aggie's
really the sort of creature she would have liked to be able to be."

"Well," Mitchy said, "I should have adored her even if she HAD been
able."

Mrs. Brook had for some minutes played no audible part, but the acute
observer we are constantly taking for granted would perhaps have
detected in her, as one of the effects of the special complexion to-day
of Vanderbank's presence, a certain smothered irritation. "She couldn't
possibly have been able," she now interposed, "with so loose--or rather,
to express it more properly, with so perverse--a mother."

"And yet, my dear lady," Mitchy promptly qualified, "how if in little
Aggie's case the Duchess hasn't prevented--?"

Mrs. Brook was full of wisdom. "Well, it's a different thing. I'm not,
as a mother--am I, Van?--bad ENOUGH. That's what's the matter with me.
Aggie, don't you see? is the Duchess's morality, her virtue; which, by
having it that way outside of you, as one may say, you can make a much
better thing of. The child has been for Jane, I admit, a capital little
subject, but Jane has kept her on hand and finished her like some
wonderful piece of stitching. Oh as work it's of a soigne! There it
is--to show. A woman like me has to be HERSELF, poor thing, her virtue
and her morality. What will you have? It's our lumbering English plan."

"So that her daughter," Mitchy sympathised, "can only, by the
arrangement, hope to become at the best her immorality and her vice?"

But Mrs. Brook, without an answer for the question, appeared suddenly to
have plunged into a sea of thought. "The only way for Nanda to have been
REALLY nice--!"

"Would have been for YOU to be like Jane?"

Mitchy and his hostess seemed for a minute, on this, to gaze together
at the tragic truth. Then she shook her head. "We see our mistakes
too late." She repeated the movement, but as if to let it all go, and
Vanderbank meanwhile, pulling out his watch, had got up with a laugh
that showed some inattention and made to Mitchy a remark about their
walking away together. Mitchy, engaged for the instant with Mrs. Brook,
had assented only with a nod, but the attitude of the two men had become
that of departure. Their friend looked at them as if she would like to
keep one of them, and for a purpose co