He was by this time off, but Mrs. Brook kept Mitchy a moment. “Now--by that suggestion--he has something to show. He won’t go in.” III Her visitors had been gone half an hour, but she was still in the drawing-room when Nanda came back. The girl found her, on the sofa, in a posture that might have represented restful oblivion, but that, after a glance, our young lady appeared to interpret as mere intensity of thought. It was a condition from which at all events Mrs. Brook was quickly roused by her daughter’s presence: she opened her eyes and put down her feet, so that the two were confronted as closely as persons may be when it is only one of them who looks at the other. Nanda, gazing vaguely about and not seeking a seat, slowly drew off her gloves while her mother’s sad eyes considered her from top to toe. “Tea’s gone,” Mrs. Brook then said as if there were something in the loss peculiarly irretrievable. “But I suppose,” she added, “he gave you all you want.” “Oh dear yes, thank you--I’ve had lots.” Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and ribboned, dressed in thin fresh fabrics and faint colours, with something in the effect of it all to which the sweeter deeper melancholy in her mother’s eyes seemed happily to testify. “Just turn round, dear.” The girl immediately obeyed, and Mrs. Brook once more took everything in. “The back’s best--only she didn’t do what she said she would. How they do lie!” she gently quavered. “Yes, but we lie so to THEM.” Nanda had swung round again, producing evidently on her mother’s part, by the admirable “hang” of her light skirts, a still deeper peace. “Do you mean the middle fold?--I knew she wouldn’t. I don’t want my back to be best--I don’t walk backward.” “Yes,” Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; “you dress for yourself.” “Oh how can you say that,” the girl asked, “when I never stick in a pin but what I think of YOU!” “Well,” Mrs. Brook moralised, “one must always, I consider, think, as a sort of point de repere, of some one good person. Only it’s best if it’s a person one’s afraid of. You do very well, but I’m not enough. What one really requires is a kind of salutary terror. I never stick in a pin without thinking of your Cousin Jane. What is it that some one quotes somewhere about some one’s having said that ‘Our antagonist is our helper--he prevents our being superficial’? The extent to which with my poor clothes the Duchess prevents ME--!” It was a measure Mrs. Brook could give only by the general soft wail of her submission to fate. “Yes, the Duchess isn’t a woman, is she? She’s a standard.”