the clock. "What's Mr. Vanderbank looking for?"

Her companion appeared to oblige her by anxiously thinking. "Oh, HE, I'm
afraid, poor dear--for nothing at all!"

The Duchess had taken off a glove to appease her appetite, and now,
drawing it on, she smoothed it down. "I think he has his ideas."

"The same as yours?"

"Well, more like them than like yours."

"Ah perhaps then--for he and I," said Mrs. Brookenham, "don't agree, I
feel, on two things in the world. So you think poor Mitchy," she went
on, "who's the son of a shoemaker and who might be the grandson of a
grasshopper, good enough for my child."

The Duchess appreciated for a moment the superior fit of her glove. "I
look facts in the face. It's exactly what I'm doing for Aggie." Then she
grew easy to extravagance. "What are you giving her?"

But Mrs. Brookenham took without wincing whatever, as between a
masterful relative and an exposed frivolity, might have been the sting
of it. "That you must ask Edward. I haven't the least idea."

"There you are again--the virtuous English mother! I've got Aggie's
little fortune in an old stocking and I count it over every night. If
you've no old stocking for Nanda there are worse fates than shoemakers
and grasshoppers. Even WITH one, you know, I don't at all say that I
should sniff at poor Mitchy. We must take what we can get and I shall be
the first to take it. You can't have everything for ninepence." And the
Duchess got up--shining, however, with a confessed light of fantasy.
"Speak to him, my dear--speak to him!"

"Do you mean offer him my child?"

She laughed at the intonation. "There you are once more--vous autres! If
you're shocked at the idea you place drolement your delicacy. I'd offer
mine to the son of a chimney-sweep if the principal guarantees were
there. Nanda's charming--you don't do her justice. I don't say Mr.
Mitchett's either beautiful or noble, and he certainly hasn't as much
distinction as would cover the point of a pin. He doesn't mind moreover
what he says--the lengths he sometimes goes to!--but that," added the
Duchess with decision, "is no doubt much a matter of how he finds you'll
take it. And after marriage what does it signify? He has forty
thousand a year, an excellent idea of how to take care of it and a good
disposition."

Mrs. Brookenham sat still; she only looked up at her friend. "Is it by
Lord Petherton that you know of his excellent idea?"

The Duchess showed she was challeng