nnected somehow with the other,
but was oddly, almost ludicrously, embarrassed to choose. What was in
her face indeed during this short passage might prove to have been,
should we penetrate, the flicker of a sense that in spite of all
intimacy and amiability they could, at bottom and as things commonly
turned out, only be united against her. Yet she made at the end a sort
of choice in going on to Mitchy: "He hasn't at all told you the real
reason of Nanda's idea that you should go in for Aggie."

"Oh I draw the line there," said Vanderbank. "Besides, he understands
that too."

Mitchy, on the spot, did himself and every one justice. "Why it just
disposes of me, doesn't it?"

It made Vanderbank, restless now and turning about the room, stop with a
smile at Mrs. Brook. "We understand too well!"

"Not if he doesn't understand," she replied after a moment while she
turned to Mitchy, "that his real 'combination' can in the nature of the
case only be--!"

"Oh yes"--Mitchy took her straight up--"with the young thing who is, as
you say, positively and helplessly modern and the pious fraud of whose
classic identity with a sheet of white paper has been--ah tacitly
of course, but none the less practically!--dropped. You've so often
reminded me. I do understand. If I were to go in for Aggie it would only
be to oblige. The modern girl, the product of our hard London facts and
of her inevitable consciousness of them just as they are--she, wonderful
being, IS, I fully recognise, my real affair, and I'm not ashamed to say
that when I like the individual I'm not afraid of the type. She knows
too much--I don't say; but she doesn't know after all a millionth part
of what _I_ do."

"I'm not sure!" Mrs. Brook earnestly exclaimed.

He had rung out and he kept it up with a limpidity unusual. "And product
for product, when you come to that, I'm a queerer one myself than any
other. The traditions _I_ smash!" Mitchy laughed.

Mrs. Brook had got up and Vanderbank had gone again to the window.
"That's exactly why," she returned. "You're a pair of monsters and your
monstrosity fits. She does know too much," she added.

"Well," said Mitchy with resolution, "it's all my fault."

"Not ALL--unless," Mrs. Brook returned, "that's only a sweet way of
saying that it's mostly mine."

"Oh yours too--immensely; in fact every one's. Even Edward's, I dare
say; and certainly, unmistakably, Harold's. Ah and Van's own--rather!"
Mitchy continued; "for