," said Mrs. Brook, "do
you know?"

"Oh I know when we're in a thing like this."

"Yet you complain of her want of intimacy with you! It turns out that
you're as thick as thieves."

Edward looked at this charge as he looked at all old friends, without
a sign--to call a sign--of recognition. "I don't know of whose want of
intimacy with me I've ever complained. There isn't much more of it, that
I can see, that any of them could put on. What do you suppose I'd have
them do? If I on my side don't get very far I may have alluded to THAT."

"Oh but you do," Mrs. Brook declared. "You think you don't, but you
get very far indeed. You're always, as I said just now, bringing out
something that you've got somewhere."

"Yes, and seeing you flare up at it. What I bring out is only what they
tell me."

This limitation offered, however, for Mrs. Brook no difficulty. "Ah but
it seems to me that with the things people nowadays tell one--! What
more do you want?"

"Well"--and Edward from his chair regarded the fire a while--"the
difference must be in what they tell YOU."

"Things that are better?"

"Yes--worse. I dare say," he went on, "what I give them--"

"Isn't as bad as what I do? Oh we must each do our best. But when I hear
from you," Mrs. Brook pursued, "that Nanda had ever permitted herself
anything so dreadful as to wire to him, it comes over me afresh that _I_
would have been the perfect one to deal with him if his detestation of
me hadn't prevented." She was by this time also--but on her feet--before
the fire, into which, like her husband, she gazed. "_I_ would never have
wired. I'd have gone in for little delicacies and odd things she has
never thought of."

"Oh she doesn't go in for what you do," Edward assented.

"She's as bleak as a chimney-top when the fire's out, and if it hadn't
been after all for mamma--!" And she lost herself again in the reasons
of things.

Her husband's silence seemed to mark for an instant a deference to her
allusion, but there was a limit even to this combination. "You make your
mother, I think, keep it up pretty well. But if she HADN'T as you say,
done so--?"

"Why we shouldn't have been anywhere."

"Well, where are we now? That's what _I_ want to know."

Following her own train she had at first no heed for his question.
"Without his hatred he would have liked me." But she came back with a
sigh to the actual. "No matter. We must deal with what we've got."

"What HAVE we got?