I'm frantically grateful to her, because
in the long run--one way or another--she'll have found her account. It
nevertheless worries me to see her; and all the more because of this
very certitude, which you've so kindly just settled for me, that our
young man hasn't really with her mother--"

Whatever the certitude Mr. Longdon had kindly settled, it was in another
interest that he at this moment broke in. "Is he YOUR young man too?"

She was not too much amused to cast about her.

"Aren't such marked ornaments of life a little the property of all who
admire and enjoy them?"

"You 'enjoy' him?" Mr. Longdon asked in the same straightforward way.

"Immensely."

His silence for a little seemed the sign of a plan. "What is it he
hasn't done with Mrs. Brook?"

"Well, the thing that WOULD be the complication. He hasn't gone beyond
a certain point. You may ask how one knows such matters, but I'm afraid
I've not quite a receipt for it. A woman knows, but she can't tell. They
haven't done, as it's called, anything wrong."

Mr. Longdon frowned. "It would be extremely horrid if they had."

"Ah but, for you and me who know life, it isn't THAT that--if other
things had made for it--would have prevented! As it happens, however,
we've got off easily. She doesn't speak to him--!"

She had forms he could only take up. "'Speak' to him--?"

"Why as much as she would have liked to be able to believe."

"Then where's the danger of which you appear to wish to warn me?"

"Just in her feeling in the case as most women would feel. You see she
did what she could for her daughter. She did, I'm bound to say, as that
sort of thing goes among you people, a good deal. She treasured up, she
nursed along Mitchy, whom she would also, though of course not so much,
have liked herself. Nanda could have kept him on with a word, becoming
thereby so much the less accessible for YOUR plan. That would have
thoroughly obliged her mother, but your little English girls, in
these altered times--oh I know how you feel them!--don't stand on such
trifles; and--even if you think it odd of me--I can't defend myself,
though I've so directly profited, against a certain compassion also for
Mrs. Brook's upset. As a good-natured woman I feel in short for both of
them. I deplore all round what's after all a rather sad relation. Only,
as I tell you, Nanda's the one, I naturally say to myself, for me now
most to think of; if I don't assume too much, that is, that y