“Let her at least know how to be bad? Ah,” Mitchy replied, “your irritation testifies more than anything else could do to our peculiar genius or our peculiar want of it. Our vice is intolerably clumsy--if it can possibly be a question of vice in regard to that charming child, who looks like one of the new-fashioned bill-posters, only, in the way of ‘morbid modernity,’ as Mrs. Brook would say, more extravagant and funny than any that have yet been risked. I remember,” he continued, “Mrs. Brook’s having spoken of her to me lately as ‘wild.’ Wild?--why, she’s simply tameness run to seed. Such an expression shows the state of training to which Mrs. Brook has reduced the rest of us.” “It doesn’t prevent at any rate, Mrs. Brook’s training, some of the rest of you from being horrible,” the Duchess declared. “What did you mean just now, really, by asking me to explain before Aggie this so serious matter of Nanda’s exposure?” Then instantly taking herself up before Mr. Mitchett could answer: “What on earth do you suppose Edward’s saying to my darling?” Brookenham had placed himself, side by side with the child, on a distant little settee, but it was impossible to make out from the countenance of either if a sound had passed between them. Aggie’s little manner was too developed to show, and her host’s not developed enough. “Oh he’s awfully careful,” Lord Petherton reassuringly observed. “If you or I or Mitchy say anything bad it’s sure to be before we know it and without particularly meaning it. But old Edward means it--” “So much that as a general thing he doesn’t dare to say it?” the Duchess asked. “That’s a pretty picture of him, inasmuch as for the most part he never speaks. What therefore must he mean?” “He’s an abyss--he’s magnificent!” Mr. Mitchett laughed. “I don’t know a man of an understanding more profound, and he’s equally incapable of uttering and of wincing. If by the same token I’m ‘horrible,’ as you call me,” he pursued, “it’s only because I’m in everyway so beastly superficial. All the same I do sometimes go into things, and I insist on knowing,” he again broke out, “what it exactly was you had in mind in saying to Mrs. Brook the things about Nanda and myself that she repeated to me.” “You ‘insist,’ you silly man?”--the Duchess had veered a little to indulgence. “Pray on what ground of right, in such a connexion, do you do anything of the sort?” Poor Mitchy showed but for a moment that he felt pulled up. “Do you mean that when a girl liked by a fellow likes him so little in return--?”