“Well, it ought to be somebody’s, you know. One would suppose it to be her mother’s--her father’s; but in this country the parents are even more emancipated than the children. Suppose, really, since it appears to be nobody’s affair, that you and I do make it ours. We needn’t either of us,” she continued, “be concerned for the other’s reasons, though I’m perfectly ready, I assure you, to put my cards on the table. You’ve your feelings--we know they’re beautiful. I, on my side, have mine--for which I don’t pretend anything but that they’re strong. They can dispense with being beautiful when they’re so perfectly settled. Besides, I may mention, they’re rather nice than otherwise. Edward and I have a cousinage, though for all he does to keep it up--! If he leaves his children to play in the street I take it seriously enough to make an occasional dash for them before they’re run over. And I want for Nanda simply the man she herself wants--it isn’t as if I wanted for her a dwarf or a hunchback or a coureur or a drunkard. Vanderbank’s a man whom any woman, don’t you think? might be--whom more than one woman IS--glad of for herself: beau comme le jour, awfully conceited and awfully patronising, but clever and successful and yet liked, and without, so far as I know, any of the terrific appendages which in this country so often diminish the value of even the pleasantest people. He hasn’t five horrible unmarried sisters for his wife to have always on a visit. The way your women don’t marry is the ruin here of society, and I’ve been assured in good quarters--though I don’t know so much about that--the ruin also of conversation and of literature. Isn’t it precisely just a little to keep Nanda herself from becoming that kind of appendage--say to poor Harold, say, one of these days, to her younger brother and sister--that friends like you and me feel the importance of bestirring ourselves in time? Of course she’s supposedly young, but she’s really any age you like: your London world so fearfully batters and bruises them.” She had gone fast and far, but it had given Mr. Longdon time to feel himself well afloat. There were so many things in it all to take up that he laid his hand--of which, he was not unconscious, the feebleness exposed him--on the nearest. “Why I’m sure her mother--after twenty years of it--is fresh enough.” “Fresh? You find Mrs. Brook fresh?” The Duchess had a manner that, in its all-knowingness, rather humiliated than encouraged; but he was all the more resolute for being conscious of his own reserves. “It seems to me it’s fresh to look about thirty.” “That indeed would be perfect. But she doesn’t--she looks about three. She simply looks a baby.” “Oh Duchess, you’re really too particular!” he retorted, feeling that, as the trodden worm will turn, anxiety itself may sometimes tend to wit.