She shook her head with a world of accepted woe. “‘Give me back, give me back one hour of my youth’! Oh I haven’t a single thrill left to answer a compliment. I sit here now face to face with things as they are. They come in their turn, I assure you--and they find me,” Mrs. Brook sighed, “ready. Nanda has stepped on the stage and I give her up the house. Besides,” she went on musingly, “it’s awfully interesting. It IS the modern daughter--we’re really ‘doing’ her, the child and I; and as the modern has always been my own note--I’ve gone in, I mean, frankly for my very own Time--who is one, after all, that one should pretend to decline to go where it may lead?” Mr. Cashmore was unprepared with an answer to this question, and his hostess continued in a different tone: “It’s sweet her sparing one!” This, for the visitor, was firmer ground. “Do you mean about talking before her?” Mrs. Brook’s assent was positively tender. “She won’t have a difference in my freedom. It’s as if the dear thing KNEW, don’t you see? what we must keep back. She wants us not to have to think. It’s quite maternal!” she mused again. Then as if with the pleasure of presenting it to him afresh: “That’s the modern daughter!” “Well,” said Mr. Cashmore, “I can’t help wishing she were a trifle less considerate. In that case I might find her with you, and I may tell you frankly that I get more from her than I do from you. She has the great merit for me, in the first place, of not being such an admirer of my wife.” Mrs. Brookenham took this up with interest. “No--you’re right; she doesn’t, as I do, SEE Lady Fanny, and that’s a kind of mercy.” “There you are then, you inconsistent creature,” he cried with a laugh: “after all you DO believe me! You recognise how benighted it would be for your daughter not to feel that Fanny’s bad.” “You’re too tiresome, my dear man,” Mrs. Brook returned, “with your ridiculous simplifications. Fanny’s NOT ‘bad’; she’s magnificently good--in the sense of being generous and simple and true, too adorably unaffected and without the least mesquinerie. She’s a great calm silver statue.” Mr. Cashmore showed, on this, something of the strength that comes from the practice of public debate. “Then why are you glad your daughter doesn’t like her?” Mrs. Brook smiled as with the sadness of having too much to triumph. “Because I’m not, like Fanny, without mesquinerie. I’m not generous and simple. I’m exaggeratedly anxious about Nanda. I care, in spite of myself, for what people may say. Your wife doesn’t--she towers above them. I can be a shade less brave through the chance of my girl’s not happening to feel her as the rest of us do.” Mr. Cashmore too heavily followed. “To ‘feel’ her?”