erlocutor's reply was not too rapid to anticipate Mrs. Brook
herself. "My dear Jane, that only proves his having reached some
extravagance in the other sense that you had in mere decency to
match. The truth is probably in the 'mean'--isn't that what they
call it?--between you. Don't YOU now take him away," she went on to
Vanderbank, who had glanced about for some better accommodation.

He immediately pushed forward the nearest chair, which happened to be by
the Duchess's side of the sofa. "Will you sit here, sir?"

"If you'll stay to protect me."

"That was really what I brought him over to you for," Mrs. Brook said
while Mr. Longdon took his place and Vanderbank looked out for another
seat. "But I didn't know," she observed with her sweet free curiosity,
"that he called you 'sir.'" She often made discoveries that were fairly
childlike. "He has done it twice."

"Isn't that only your inevitable English surprise," the Duchess
demanded, "at the civility quite the commonest in other societies?--so
that one has to come here to find it regarded, in the way of ceremony,
as the very end of the world!"

"Oh," Mr. Longdon remarked, "it's a word I rather like myself even to
employ to others."

"I always ask here," the Duchess continued to him, "what word they've
got instead. And do you know what they tell me?"

Mrs. Brook wondered, then again, before he was ready, charmingly
suggested: "Our pretty manner?" Quickly too she appealed to Mr. Longdon.
"Is THAT what you miss from me?"

He wondered, however, more than Mrs. Brook. "Your 'pretty manner'?"

"Well, these grand old forms that the Duchess is such a mistress of."
Mrs. Brook had with this one of her eagerest visions. "Did mamma say
'sir' to you? Ought _I_? Do you really get it, in private, out of Nanda?
SHE has such depths of discretion," she explained to the Duchess and to
Vanderbank, who had come back with his chair, "that it's just the kind
of racy anecdote she never in the world gives me."

Mr. Longdon looked across at Van, placed now, after a moment's talk
with Tishy in sight of them all, by Mrs. Brook's arm of the sofa. "You
haven't protected--you've only exposed me."

"Oh there's no joy without danger"--Mrs. Brook took it up with spirit.
"Perhaps one should even say there's no danger without joy."

Vanderbank's eyes had followed Mrs. Grendon after his brief passage with
her, terminated by some need of her listless presence on the other side
of the room. "Wha