“Look at her now,” his friend went on with an indication that was indeed easy to embrace. Separated from them by the width of the room, Mrs. Brook was, though placed in profile, fully presented; the satisfaction with which she had lately sunk upon a light gilt chair marked itself as superficial and was moreover visibly not confirmed by the fact that Vanderbank’s high-perched head, arrested before her in a general survey of opportunity, kept her eyes too far above the level of talk. Their companions were dispersed, some in the other room, and for the occupants of the Duchess’s sofa they made, as a couple in communion, a picture, framed and detached, vaguely reduplicated in the high polish of the French floor. “She IS tremendously pretty.” The Duchess appeared to drop this as a plea for indulgence and to be impelled in fact by the interlocutor’s silence to carry it further. “I’ve never at all thought, you know, that Nanda touches her.” Mr. Longdon demurred. “Do you mean for beauty?” His friend, for his simplicity, discriminated. “Ah they’ve neither of them ‘beauty.’ That’s not a word to make free with. But the mother has grace.” “And the daughter hasn’t “Not a line. You answer me of course, when I say THAT, you answer me with your adored Lady Julia, and will want to know what then becomes of the lucky resemblance. I quite grant you that Lady Julia must have had the thing we speak of. But that dear sweet blessed thing is very much the same lost secret as the dear sweet blessed OTHER thing that went away with it--the decent leisure that, for the most part, we’ve also seen the last of. It’s the thing at any rate that poor Nanda and all her kind have most effectually got rid of. Oh if you’d trust me a little more you’d see that I’m quite at one with you on all the changes for the worse. I bear up, but I’m old enough to have known. All the same Mrs. Brook has something--say what you like--when she bends that little brown head. Dieu sait comme elle se coiffe, but what she gets out of it! Only look.” Mr. Longdon conveyed in an indescribable manner that he had retired to a great distance; yet even from this position he must have launched a glance that arrived at a middle way. “They both know you’re watching them.” “And don’t they know YOU are? Poor Mr. Van has a consciousness!” “So should I if two terrible women--” “Were admiring you both at once?” The Duchess folded the big feathered fan that had partly protected their vision. “Well, SHE, poor dear, can’t help it. She wants him herself.” At the drop of the Duchess’s fan he restored his nippers. “And he doesn’t--not a bit--want HER!” “There it is. She has put down her money, as it were, without a return. She has given Mitchy up and got nothing instead.” There was delicacy, yet there was distinctness, in Mr. Longdon’s reserve. “Do you call ME nothing?”