ing your own behaviour. You'd be much
worse to us if it wasn't for the still warm ashes of your old passion."
It was an immense pity for Vanderbank's amusement that he was at this
moment too far off to fit to the expression of his old friend's face so
much of the cause of it as had sprung from the deeply informed tone
of Mrs. Brook's allusion. To what degree the speaker herself made the
connexion will never be known to history, nor whether as she went on she
thought she bettered her case or she simply lost her head. "The great
thing for us is that we can never be for you quite like other ordinary
people."

"And what's the great thing for ME?"

"Oh for you, there's nothing, I'm afraid, but small things--so small
that they can scarcely be worth the trouble of your making them out. Our
being so happy that you've come back to us--if only just for a glimpse
and to leave us again, in no matter what horror, for ever; our positive
delight in your being exactly so different; the pleasure we have in
talking about you, and shall still have--or indeed all the more--even
if we've seen you only to lose you: whatever all this represents for
ourselves it's for none of us to pretend to say how much or how little
YOU may pick out of it. And yet," Mrs. Brook wandered on, "however much
we may disappoint you some little spark of the past can't help being
in us--for the past is the one thing beyond all spoiling: there it is,
don't you think?--to speak for itself and, if need be, only OF itself."
She pulled up, but she appeared to have destroyed all power of speech in
him, so that while she waited she had time for a fresh inspiration. It
might perhaps frankly have been mentioned as on the whole her finest.
"Don't you think it possible that if you once get the point of view of
realising that I KNOW--?"

She held the note so long that he at last supplied a sound. "That you
know what?"

"Why that compared with her I'm a poor creeping thing. I mean"--she
hastened to forestall any protest of mere decency that would spoil her
idea--"that of course I ache in every limb with the certainty of my
dreadful difference. It isn't as if I DIDN'T know it, don't you see?
There it is as a matter of course: I've helplessly but finally and
completely accepted it. Won't THAT help you?" she so ingeniously
pleaded. "It isn't as if I tormented you with any recall of her
whatever. I can quite see how awful it would be for you if, with the
effect I produce on you