Mrs. Brook, who looked immensely struck, replied with the promptest sympathy, yet as if there might have been an alternative. “I don’t think”--and her eyes appealed to the others--“that we want ANY more, do we? than the whole thing.” “Gracious, I should hope not!” her husband remarked as privately as before to Vanderbank. “Jane--for a mixed company--does go into it.” Vanderbank, for a minute and with a special short arrest, took in the circle. “Should you call us ‘mixed’? There’s only ONE girl.” Edward Brookenham glanced at his daughter. “Yes, but I wish there were more.” “DO you?” And Vanderbank’s laugh at this odd view covered, for a little, the rest of the talk. But when he again began to follow no victory had yet been snatched. It was Mrs. Brook naturally who rattled the standard. “When you say, dearest, that we don’t know what to ‘do’ with Aggie’s cleverness, do you quite allow for the way we bow down before it and worship it? I don’t quite see what else we--in here--can do with it, even though we HAVE gathered that, just over there, Petherton’s finding for it a different application. We can only each in our way do our best. Don’t therefore succumb, Jane, to the delusive harm of a grievance. There would be nothing in it. You haven’t got one. The beauty of the life that so many of us have so long led together”--and she showed that it was for Mr. Longdon she more particularly brought this out--“is precisely that nobody has ever had one. Nobody has dreamed of it--it would have been such a rough false note, a note of violence out of all keeping. Did YOU ever hear of one, Van? Did you, my poor Mitchy? But you see for yourselves,” she wound up with a sigh and before either could answer, “how inferior we’ve become when we have even in our defence to assert such things.” Mitchy, who for a while past had sat gazing at the floor, now raised his good natural goggles and stretched his closed mouth to its widest. “Oh I think we’re pretty good still!” he then replied. Mrs. Brook indeed appeared, after a pause and addressing herself again to Tishy, to give a reluctant illustration of it, coming back as from an excursion of the shortest to the question momentarily dropped. “I’m bound to say--all the more you know--that I don’t quite see what Aggie mayn’t now read.” Suddenly, however, her look at their informant took on an anxiety. “Is the book you speak of something VERY awful?” Mrs. Grendon, with so much these past minutes to have made her so, was at last visibly more present. “That’s what Lord Petherton says of it. From what he knows of the author.” “So that he wants to keep her--?” “Well, from trying it first. I think he wants to see if it’s good for her.” “That’s one of the most charming soins, I think,” the Duchess said, “that a gentleman may render a young woman to whom he desires to be useful. I won’t say that Petherton always knows how good a book may be, but I’d trust him any day to say how bad.”