ing, feathered and ribboned, dressed
in thin fresh fabrics and faint colours, with something in the effect
of it all to which the sweeter deeper melancholy in her mother's eyes
seemed happily to testify. "Just turn round, dear." The girl immediately
obeyed, and Mrs. Brook once more took everything in. "The back's
best--only she didn't do what she said she would. How they do lie!" she
gently quavered.

"Yes, but we lie so to THEM." Nanda had swung round again, producing
evidently on her mother's part, by the admirable "hang" of her light
skirts, a still deeper peace. "Do you mean the middle fold?--I knew she
wouldn't. I don't want my back to be best--I don't walk backward."

"Yes," Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; "you dress for yourself."

"Oh how can you say that," the girl asked, "when I never stick in a pin
but what I think of YOU!"

"Well," Mrs. Brook moralised, "one must always, I consider, think, as a
sort of point de repere, of some one good person. Only it's best if it's
a person one's afraid of. You do very well, but I'm not enough. What
one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. I never stick in a pin
without thinking of your Cousin Jane. What is it that some one quotes
somewhere about some one's having said that 'Our antagonist is our
helper--he prevents our being superficial'? The extent to which with
my poor clothes the Duchess prevents ME--!" It was a measure Mrs. Brook
could give only by the general soft wail of her submission to fate.

"Yes, the Duchess isn't a woman, is she? She's a standard."

The speech had for Nanda's companion, however, no effect of pleasantry
or irony, and it was a mark of the special intercourse of these good
friends that though they showed each other, in manner and tone, such
sustained consideration as might almost have given it the stamp of
diplomacy, there was yet in it also something of that economy of
expression which is the result of a common experience. The recurrence
of opportunity to observe them together would have taught a spectator
that--on Mrs. Brook's side doubtless more particularly--their relation
was governed by two or three remarkably established and, as might have
been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was to guard against the
vulgarity so often coming to the surface between parent and child. That
they WERE as good friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a
truth that no passage between them might fail in one way or another to
illustrate.