“My dear Mitchy,” said Mrs. Brookenham, “what do YOU know about ‘trouble’--either poor Nanda’s or mine or anybody’s else? You’ve never had to take any in your life, you’re the spoiled child of fortune and you skim over the surface of things in a way that seems often to represent you as supposing everybody else has wings. Most other people are sticking fast in their native mud.” “Mud, Mrs. Brook--mud, mud!” he protestingly cried as, while he watched his fellow visitor move to a distance with their host, he glanced about the room, taking in afresh the Louis Seize secretary which looked better closed than open and for which he always had a knowing eye. “Remarkably charming--mud!” “Well, that’s what a great deal of the element really appears to-day to be thought; and precisely as a specimen, Mitchy dear, those two French books you were so good as to send me and which--really this time, you extraordinary man!” She fell back, intimately reproachful, from the effect produced on her, renouncing all expression save that of the rolled eye. “Why, were they particularly dreadful?”--Mitchy was honestly surprised. “I rather liked the one in the pink cover--what’s the confounded thing called?--I thought it had a sort of a something-or-other.” He had cast his eye about as if for a glimpse of the forgotten title, and she caught the question as he vaguely and good-humouredly dropped it. “A kind of a morbid modernity? There IS that,” she dimly conceded. “Is that what they call it? Awfully good name. You must have got it from old Van!” he gaily declared. “I dare say I did. I get the good things from him and the bad ones from you. But you’re not to suppose,” Mrs. Brookenham went on, “that I’ve discussed your horrible book with him.” “Come, I say!” Mr. Mitchett protested; “I’ve seen you with books from Vanderbank which if you HAVE discussed them with him--well,” he laughed, “I should like to have been there!” “You haven’t seen me with anything like yours--no, no, never, never!” She was particularly positive. “Van on the contrary gives tremendous warnings, makes apologies, in advance, for things that--well, after all, haven’t killed one.” “That have even perhaps a little, after the warnings, let one down?” She took no notice of this coarse pleasantry, she simply adhered to her thesis. “One has taken one’s dose and one isn’t such a fool as to be deaf to some fresh true note if it happens to turn up. But for abject horrid unredeemed vileness from beginning to end--” “So you read to the end?” Mr. Mitchett interposed. “I read to see what you could possibly have sent such things to me for, and because so long as they were in my hands they were not in the hands of others. Please to remember in future that the children are all over the place and that Harold and Nanda have their nose in everything.” “I promise to remember,” Mr. Mitchett returned, “as soon as you make old Van do the same.”