ther. It's from Jane I've heard
of what she calls her 'young things.' It seems so odd to think of Mitchy
as a young thing. He's as old as all time, and his wife, who the other
day was about six, is now practically about forty. And I also saw
Petherton," Mrs. Brook added, "on his return."

"His return from where?"

"Why he was with them at Corfu, Malta, Cyprus--I don't know where;
yachting, spending Mitchy's money, 'larking,' he called it--I don't know
what. He was with them for weeks."

"Till Jane, you mean, called him in?"

"I think it must have been that."

"Well, that's better," said Van, "than if Mitchy had had to call him
out."

"Oh Mitchy--!" Mrs. Brook comprehensively sounded.

Her visitor quite assented. "Isn't he amazing?"

"Unique."

He had a short pause. "But what's she up to?"

It was apparently for Mrs. Brook a question of such variety of
application that she brought out experimentally: "Jane?"

"Dear no. I think we've fathomed 'Jane,' haven't we?"

"Well," mused Mrs. Brook, "I'm by no means sure I have. Just of late
I've had a new sense!"

"Yes, of what now?" Van amusedly put it as she held the note.

"Oh of depths below depths. But poor Jane--of course after all she's
human. She's beside herself with one thing and another, but she can't
in any consistency show it. She took her stand so on having with
Petherton's aid formed Aggie for a femme charmante--"

"That it's too late to cry out that Petherton's aid can now be dispensed
with? Do you mean then that he IS such a brute that after all Mitchy
has done for him--?" Vanderbank, at the rising image, pulled up in easy
disgust.

"I think him quite capable of considering with a magnificent insolence
of selfishness that what Mitchy has MOST done will have been to make
Aggie accessible in a way that--for decency and delicacy of course,
things on which Petherton highly prides himself--she could naturally not
be as a girl. Her marriage has simplified it."

Vanderbank took it all in. "'Accessible' is good!"

"Then--which was what I intended just now--Aggie has already become
so--?"

Mrs. Brook, however, could as yet in fairness only wonder. "That's just
what I'm dying to see."

Her companion smiled at it. "'Even in our ashes live their wonted
fires'! But what do you make, in such a box, of poor Mitchy himself? His
marriage can scarcely to such an extent have simplified HIM."

It was something, none the less, that Mrs. Brook had to weigh.