Vanderbank, cultivating his detachment, made at first no more reply than if he had not heard, and the others meanwhile showed faces that testified perhaps less than their respective speeches had done to the absence of anxiety. The only token he immediately gave was to get up and approach Mitchy, before whom he stood a minute laughing kindly enough, though not altogether gaily. As if then for a better proof of gaiety he presently seized him by the shoulders and, still without speaking, pushed him backward into the chair he himself had just quitted. Mrs. Brook’s eyes, from the sofa, while this went on, attached themselves to her visitors. It took Vanderbank, as he moved about and his companions waited, a minute longer to produce what he had in mind. “What IS splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care--so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity--to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that,” he continued to Mitchy, “was what made me break out to you about her when you came in.” He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. “What’s really ‘superior’ in her is that, though I suddenly show her an interference with a favourite plan, her personal resentment’s nothing--all she wants is to see what may really happen, to take in the truth of the case and make the best of that. She offers me the truth, as she sees it, about myself, and with no nasty elation if it does chance to be the truth that suits her best. It was a charming, charming stroke.” Mitchy’s appreciation was no bar to his amusement. “You’re wonderfully right about us. But still it was a stroke.” If Mrs. Brook was less diverted she followed perhaps more closely. “If you do me so much justice then, why did you put to me such a cold cruel question?--I mean when you so oddly challenged me on my handing on your news to Mitchy. If the principal beauty of our effort to live together is--and quite according to your own eloquence--in our sincerity, I simply obeyed the impulse to do the sincere thing. If we’re not sincere we’re nothing.” “Nothing!”--it was Mitchy who first responded. “But we ARE sincere.” “Yes, we ARE sincere,” Vanderbank presently said. “It’s a great chance for us not to fall below ourselves: no doubt therefore we shall continue to soar and sing. We pay for it, people who don’t like us say, in our self-consciousness--” “But people who don’t like us,” Mitchy broke in, “don’t matter. Besides, how can we be properly conscious of each other--?” “That’s it!”--Vanderbank completed his idea: “without my finding myself for instance in you and Mrs. Brook? We see ourselves reflected--we’re conscious of the charming whole. I thank you,” he pursued after an instant to Mrs. Brook--“I thank you for your sincerity.”