“That he may not keep under by just setting his teeth and holding on? I never dreamed he does, and have nothing so alarming in store for you--rassurez-vous bien!--as to propose that he shall be invited to sink a feeling for the mother in order to take one up for the child. Don’t, please, flutter out of the whole question by a premature scare. I never supposed it’s he who wants to keep HER. He’s not in love with her--be comforted! But she’s amusing--highly amusing. I do her perfect justice. As your women go she’s rare. If she were French she’d be a femme d’esprit. She has invented a nuance of her own and she has done it all by herself, for Edward figures in her drawing-room only as one of those queer extinguishers of fire in the corridors of hotels. He’s just a bucket on a peg. The men, the young and the clever ones, find it a house--and heaven knows they’re right--with intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk. Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box. You’ll tell me we go further in Italy, and I won’t deny it, but in Italy we have the common sense not to have little girls in the room. The young men hang about Mrs. Brook, and the clever ones ply her with the uproarious appreciation that keeps her up to the mark. She’s in a prodigious fix--she must sacrifice either her daughter or what she once called to me her intellectual habits. Mr. Vanderbank, you’ve seen for yourself, is of these one of the most cherished, the most confirmed. Three months ago--it couldn’t be any longer kept off--Nanda began definitely to ‘sit’; to be there and look, by the tea-table, modestly and conveniently abstracted.” “I beg your pardon--I don’t think she looks that, Duchess,” Mr. Longdon lucidly broke in. How much she had carried him with her in spite of himself was betrayed by the very terms of his dissent. “I don’t think it would strike any one that she looks ‘convenient.’” His companion, laughing, gave a shrug. “Try her and perhaps you’ll find her so!” But his objection had none the less pulled her up a little. “I don’t say she’s a hypocrite, for it would certainly be less decent for her to giggle and wink. It’s Mrs. Brook’s theory moreover, isn’t it? that she has, from five to seven at least, lowered the pitch. Doesn’t she pretend that she bears in mind every moment the tiresome difference made by the presence of sweet virginal eighteen?” “I haven’t, I’m afraid, a notion of what she pretends!” Mr. Longdon had spoken with a curtness to which his friend’s particular manner of overlooking it only added significance. “They’ve become,” she pursued, “superficial or insincere or frivolous, but at least they’ve become, with the way the drag’s put on, quite as dull as other people.” He showed no sign of taking this up; instead of it he said abruptly: “But if it isn’t Mr. Mitchett’s own idea?”