. "That discrimination's our only austerity. You
must fall in."

"Then what will you call ME?"

"What can we?" After which, sustainingly, "I'm 'Mitchy,'" our friend
stated.

His interlocutor looked slightly queer. "I don't think I can quite
begin. I'm Mr. Longdon," he almost blushed to articulate.

"Absolutely and essentially--that's exactly what I recognise. I defy any
one to see you," Mitchy declared, "as anything else, and on that footing
you'll be, among us, unique."

Mr. Longdon appeared to accept his prospect of isolation with a
certain gravity. "I gather from you--I've gathered indeed from Mr.
Vanderbank--that you're a little sort of a set that hang very much
together."

"Oh yes; not a formal association nor a secret society--still less a
'dangerous gang' or an organisation for any definite end. We're simply
a collection of natural affinities," Mitchy explained; "meeting perhaps
principally in Mrs. Brook's drawing-room--though sometimes also in old
Van's, as you see, sometimes even in mine--and governed at any rate
everywhere by Mrs. Brook, in our mysterious ebbs and flows, very much as
the tides are governed by the moon. As I say," Mitchy pursued, "you must
join. But if Van has got hold of you," he added, "or you've got hold of
him, you HAVE joined. We're not quite so numerous as I could wish, and
we want variety; we want just what I'm sure you'll bring us--a fresh
eye, an outside mind."

Mr. Longdon wore for a minute the air of a man knowing but too well what
it was to be asked to put down his name. "My friend Vanderbank swaggers
so little that it's rather from you than from himself that I seem to
catch the idea--!"

"Of his being a great figure among us? I don't know what he may have
said to you or have suppressed; but you can take it from me--as between
ourselves, you know--that he's very much the best of us. Old Van in
fact--if you really want a candid opinion," and Mitchy shone still
brighter as he talked, "is formed for a distinctly higher sphere. I
should go so far as to say that on our level he's positively wasted."

"And are you very sure you're not?" Mr. Longdon asked with a smile.

"Dear no--I'm in my element. My element's to grovel before Van. You've
only to look at me, as you must already have made out, to see I'm
everything dreadful that he isn't. But you've seen him for yourself--I
needn't tell you!" Mitchy sighed.

Mr. Longdon, as under the coercion of so much confidence, had stood