dear, and we're great friends. But she has her free young life, which,
by that law of our time that I'm sure I only want, like all other laws,
once I know what they ARE, to accept--she has her precious freshness of
feeling which I say to myself that, so far as control is concerned, I
ought to respect. I try to get her to sit with me, and she does so a
little, because she's kind. But before I know it she leaves me again:
she feels what a difference her presence makes in one's liberty of
talk."

Mr. Cashmore was struck by this picture. "That's awfully charming of
her."

"Isn't it too dear?" The thought of it, for Mrs. Brook, seemed fairly to
open out vistas. "The modern daughter!"

"But not the ancient mother!" Mr. Cashmore smiled.

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: