s in the face of irritation would have
had to be accounted for. "What do YOU call her?" she demanded.

"Why Nanda's best friend--if not her only one. That's the place I SHOULD
have liked for Aggie," Mrs. Brookenham ever so graciously smiled.

The Duchess hereupon, going beyond her, gave way to free mirth. "My
dear thing, you're delightful. Aggie OR Tishy is a sweet thought. Since
you're so good as to ask why Aggie has fallen off you'll excuse my
telling you that you've just named the reason. You've known ever since
we came to England what I feel about the proper persons--and the most
improper--for her to meet. The Tishy Grendons are not a bit the proper."

Mrs. Brookenham continued to assist a little in the preparations for
tea. "Why not say at once, Jane"--and her tone, in its appeal, was
almost infantine--"that you've come at last to placing even poor Nanda,
for Aggie's wonderful purpose, in the same impossible class?"

The Duchess took her time, but at last she accepted her duty. "Well, if
you will have it. You know my ideas. If it isn't my notion of the way to
bring up a girl to give her up, in extreme youth, to an intimacy with a
young married woman who's both unhappy and silly, whose conversation has
absolutely no limits, who says everything that comes into her head and
talks to the poor child about God only knows what--if I should never
dream of such an arrangement for my niece I can almost as little face
the prospect of throwing her MUCH, don't you see? with any young
person exposed to such an association. It would be in the natural order
certainly"--in spite of which natural order the Duchess made the point
with but moderate emphasis--"that, since dear Edward is my cousin, Aggie
should see at least as much of Nanda as of any other girl of their age.
But what will you have? I must recognise the predicament I'm placed in
by the more and more extraordinary development of English manners.
Many things have altered, goodness knows, since I was Aggie's age, but
nothing's so different as what you all do with your girls. It's all a
muddle, a compromise, a monstrosity, like everything else you produce;
there's nothing in it that goes on all-fours. _I_ see but one consistent
way, which is our fine old foreign way and which makes--in the upper
classes, mind you, for it's with them only I'm concerned--des femmes
bien gracieuses. I allude to the immemorial custom of my husband's
race, which was good enough for his mother a