t do you say then, on that theory, to the extraordinary
gloom of our hostess? Her safety, by such a rule, must be deep."

The Duchess was this time the first to know what they said. "The
expression of Tishy's face comes precisely from our comparing it so
unfavourably with that of her poor sister Carrie, who, though she isn't
here to-night with the Cashmores--amazing enough even as coming WITHOUT
that!--has so often shown us that an ame en peine, constantly tottering,
but, as Nanda guarantees us, usually recovering, may look after all as
beatific as a Dutch doll."

Mrs. Brook's eyes had, on Tishy's passing away, taken the same course as
Vanderbank's, whom she had visibly not neglected moreover while the pair
stood there. "I give you Carrie, as you know, and I throw Mr. Cashmore
in; but I'm lost in admiration to-night, as I always have been, of
the way Tishy makes her ugliness serve. I should call it, if the word
weren't so for ladies'-maids, the most 'elegant' thing I know."

"My dear child," the Duchess objected, "what you describe as making
her ugliness serve is what I should describe as concealing none of her
beauty. There's nothing the matter surely with 'elegant' as applied
to Tishy save that as commonly used it refers rather to a charm that's
artificial than to a state of pure nature. There should be for elegance
a basis of clothing. Nanda rather stints her."

Mrs. Brook, perhaps more than usually thoughtful, just discriminated.
"There IS, I think, one little place. I'll speak to her."

"To Tishy?" Vanderbank asked.

"Oh THAT would do no good. To Nanda. All the same," she continued, "it's
an awfully superficial thing of you not to see that her dreariness--on
which moreover I've set you right before--is a mere facial accident and
doesn't correspond or, as they say, 'rhyme' to anything within her that
might make it a little interesting. What I like it for is just that it's
so funny in itself. Her low spirits are nothing more than her features.
Her gloom, as you call it, is merely her broken nose."

"HAS she a broken nose?" Mr. Longdon demanded with an accent that for
some reason touched in the others the spring of laughter.

"Has Nanda never mentioned it?" Mrs. Brook profited by this gaiety to
ask.

"That's the discretion you just spoke of," said the Duchess. "Only
I should have expected from the cause you refer to rather the comic
effect."

"Mrs. Grendon's broken nose, sir," Vanderbank explained to Mr. Lo