Vanderbank wondered a moment what things in particular these might be; he found himself wanting to get at everything his visitor represented, to enter into his consciousness and feel, as it were, on his side. He glanced with an intention freely sarcastic at an easy possibility. “The extraordinary vitality of Brookenham?” Mr. Longdon, with nippers in place again, fixed on him a gravity that failed to prevent his discovering in the eyes behind them a shy reflexion of his irony. “Oh Brookenham! You must tell me all about Brookenham.” “I see that’s not what you mean.” Mr. Longdon forbore to deny it. “I wonder if you’ll understand what I mean.” Vanderbank bristled with the wish to be put to the test, but was checked before he could say so. “And what’s HIS place--Brookenham’s?” “Oh Rivers and Lakes--an awfully good thing. He got it last year.” Mr. Longdon--but not too grossly--wondered. “How did he get it?” Vanderbank laughed. “Well, SHE got it.” His friend remained grave. “And about how much now--?” “Oh twelve hundred--and lots of allowances and boats and things. To do the work!” Vanderbank, still with a certain levity, added. “And what IS the work?” The young man had a pause. “Ask HIM. He’ll like to tell you.” “Yet he seemed to have but little to say.” Mr. Longdon exactly measured it again. “Ah not about that. Try him.” He looked more sharply at his host, as if vaguely suspicious of a trap; then not less vaguely he sighed. “Well, it’s what I came up for--to try you all. But do they live on that?” he continued. Vanderbank once more debated. “One doesn’t quite know what they live on. But they’ve means--for it was just that fact, I remember, that showed Brookenham’s getting the place wasn’t a job. It was given, I mean, not to his mere domestic need, but to his notorious efficiency. He has a property--an ugly little place in Gloucestershire--which they sometimes let. His elder brother has the better one, but they make up an income.” Mr. Longdon for an instant lost himself. “Yes, I remember--one heard of those things at the time. And SHE must have had something.” “Yes indeed, she had something--and she always has her intense cleverness. She knows thoroughly how. They do it tremendously well.” “Tremendously well,” Mr. Longdon intelligently echoed. “But a house in Buckingham Crescent, with the way they seem to have built through to all sorts of other places--?” “Oh they’re all right,” Vanderbank soothingly dropped. “One likes to feel that of people with whom one has dined. There are four children?” his friend went on. “The older boy, whom you saw and who in his way is a wonder, the older girl, whom you must see, and two youngsters, male and female, whom you mustn’t.” There might by this time, in the growing interest of their talk, have been almost nothing too uncanny for Mr. Longdon to fear it. “You mean the youngsters are--unfortunate?”