wise. Edward and I have a
cousinage, though for all he does to keep it up--! If he leaves his
children to play in the street I take it seriously enough to make an
occasional dash for them before they're run over. And I want for Nanda
simply the man she herself wants--it isn't as if I wanted for her a
dwarf or a hunchback or a coureur or a drunkard. Vanderbank's a man whom
any woman, don't you think? might be--whom more than one woman IS--glad
of for herself: beau comme le jour, awfully conceited and awfully
patronising, but clever and successful and yet liked, and without, so
far as I know, any of the terrific appendages which in this country so
often diminish the value of even the pleasantest people. He hasn't five
horrible unmarried sisters for his wife to have always on a visit. The
way your women don't marry is the ruin here of society, and I've been
assured in good quarters--though I don't know so much about that--the
ruin also of conversation and of literature. Isn't it precisely just a
little to keep Nanda herself from becoming that kind of appendage--say
to poor Harold, say, one of these days, to her younger brother and
sister--that friends like you and me feel the importance of bestirring
ourselves in time? Of course she's supposedly young, but she's really
any age you like: your London world so fearfully batters and bruises
them." She had gone fast and far, but it had given Mr. Longdon time to
feel himself well afloat. There were so many things in it all to take up
that he laid his hand--of which, he was not unconscious, the feebleness
exposed him--on the nearest. "Why I'm sure her mother--after twenty
years of it--is fresh enough."

"Fresh? You find Mrs. Brook fresh?" The Duchess had a manner that, in
its all-knowingness, rather humiliated than encouraged; but he was all
the more resolute for being conscious of his own reserves. "It seems to
me it's fresh to look about thirty."

"That indeed would be perfect. But she doesn't--she looks about three.
She simply looks a baby."

"Oh Duchess, you're really too particular!" he retorted, feeling that,
as the trodden worm will turn, anxiety itself may sometimes tend to wit.

She met him in her own way. "I know what I mean. My niece is a person
_I_ call fresh. It's warranted, as they say in the shops. Besides," she
went on, "if a married woman has been knocked about that's only a part
of her condition. Elle l'a lien voulu, and if you're married you're
married; it'