“Oh of depths below depths. But poor Jane--of course after all she’s human. She’s beside herself with one thing and another, but she can’t in any consistency show it. She took her stand so on having with Petherton’s aid formed Aggie for a femme charmante--” “That it’s too late to cry out that Petherton’s aid can now be dispensed with? Do you mean then that he IS such a brute that after all Mitchy has done for him--?” Vanderbank, at the rising image, pulled up in easy disgust. “I think him quite capable of considering with a magnificent insolence of selfishness that what Mitchy has MOST done will have been to make Aggie accessible in a way that--for decency and delicacy of course, things on which Petherton highly prides himself--she could naturally not be as a girl. Her marriage has simplified it.” Vanderbank took it all in. “‘Accessible’ is good!” “Then--which was what I intended just now--Aggie has already become so--?” Mrs. Brook, however, could as yet in fairness only wonder. “That’s just what I’m dying to see.” Her companion smiled at it. “‘Even in our ashes live their wonted fires’! But what do you make, in such a box, of poor Mitchy himself? His marriage can scarcely to such an extent have simplified HIM.” It was something, none the less, that Mrs. Brook had to weigh. “I don’t know. I give it up. The thing was of a strangeness!” Her friend also paused, and it was as if for a little, on either side of a gate on which they might have had their elbows, they remained looking at each other over it and over what was unsaid between them. “It WAS ‘rum’!” he at last merely dropped. It was scarce for Mrs. Brook, all the same--she seemed to feel after a moment--to surround the matter with an excess of silence. “He did what a man does--especially in that business--when he doesn’t do what he wants.” “Do you mean what somebody else wanted?” “Well, what he himself DIDN’T. And if he’s unhappy,” she went on, “he’ll know whom to pitch into.” “Ah,” said Vanderbank, “even if he is he won’t be the man to what you might call ‘vent’ it on her. He’ll seek compensations elsewhere and won’t mind any ridicule--!” “Whom are you speaking of as ‘her’?” Mrs. Brook asked as on feeling that something in her face had made him stop. “I wasn’t referring,” she explained, “to his wife.” “Oh!” said Vanderbank. “Aggie doesn’t matter,” she went on. “Oh!” he repeated. “You meant the Duchess?” he then threw off. “Don’t be silly!” she rejoined. “He MAY not become unhappy--God grant NOT!” she developed. “But if he does he’ll take it out of Nanda.” Van appeared to challenge this. “‘Take it out’ of her?” “Well, want to know, as some American asked me the other day of somebody, what she’s ‘going to do’ about it.” Vanderbank, who had remained on his feet, stood still at this for a longer time than at anything yet. “But what CAN she ‘do’--?”