ugh vaguely murmured.

"And my wife--did you know it?" Mitchy went on, "is positively getting
thick with your mother. Of course it isn't new to you that she's
wonderful for wives. Now that our marriage is an accomplished fact she
takes the greatest interest in it--or bids fair to if her attention can
only be thoroughly secured--and more particularly in what I believe is
generally called our peculiar situation: for it appears, you know, that
we're to the most conspicuous degree possible IN a peculiar situation.
Aggie's therefore already, and is likely to be still more, in what's
universally recognised as your mother's regular line. Your mother will
attract her, study her, finally 'understand' her. In fact she'll 'help'
her as she has 'helped' so many before and will 'help' so many still to
come. With Aggie thus as a satellite and a frequenter--in a degree in
which she never yet HAS been," he continued, "what will the whole thing
be but a practical multiplication of our points of contact? You may
remind me of Mrs. Brook's contention that if she did in her time keep
something of a saloon the saloon is now, in consequence of events, but
a collection of fortuitous atoms; but that, my dear Nanda, will become
none the less, to your clearer sense, but a pious echo of her momentary
modesty or--call it at the worst--her momentary despair. The generations
will come and go, and the PERSONNEL, as the newspapers say, of the
saloon will shift and change, but the institution itself, as resting on
a deep human need, has a long course yet to run and a good work yet to
do. WE shan't last, but your mother will, and as Aggie is happily very
young she's therefore provided for, in the time to come, on a scale
sufficiently considerable to leave us just now at peace. Meanwhile,
as you're almost as good for husbands as Mrs. Brook is for wives, why
aren't we, as a couple, we Mitchys, quite ideally arranged for, and why
mayn't I speak to you of my future as sufficiently guaranteed? The only
appreciable shadow I make out comes, for me, from the question of what
may to-day be between you and Mr. Longdon. Do I understand," Mitchy
asked, "that he's presently to arrive for an answer to something he has
put to you?" Nanda looked at him a while with a sort of solemnity of
tenderness, and her voice, when she at last spoke, trembled with a
feeling that clearly had grown in her as she listened to the string of
whimsicalities, bitter and sweet, that he had ju