enge.
"Well, what are you coming to? I spoke of the change in my life of
course; I happen to be so constituted that my life has something to do
with my mind and my mind something to do with my talk. Good talk: you
know--no one, dear Van, should know better--what part for me that plays.
Therefore when one has deliberately to make one's talk bad--!"

"'Bad'?" Vanderbank, in his amusement, fell back in his chair. "Dear
Mrs. Brook, you're too delightful!"

"You know what I mean--stupid, flat, fourth-rate. When one has to haul
in sail to that degree--and for a perfectly outside reason--there's
nothing strange in one's taking a friend sometimes into the confidence
of one's irritation."

"Ah," Vanderbank protested, "you do yourself injustice. Irritation
hasn't been for you the only consequence of the affair."

Mrs. Brook gloomily thought. "No, no--I've had my calmness: the calmness
of deep despair. I've seemed to see everything go."

"Oh how can you say that," her visitor demanded, "when just what we've
most been agreed upon so often is the practical impossibility of
making any change? Hasn't it seemed as if we really can't overcome
conversational habits so thoroughly formed?"

Again Mrs. Brook reflected. "As if our way of looking at things were too
serious to be trifled with? I don't know--I think it's only you who have
denied our sacrifices, our compromises and concessions. I myself have
constantly felt smothered in them. But there it is," she impatiently
went on. "What I don't admit is that you've given me ground to take for
a proof of your 'intentions'--to use the odious term--your association
with me on behalf of the preposterous fiction, as it after all is, of
Nanda's blankness of mind."

Vanderbank's head, in his chair, was thrown back; his eyes ranged over
the top of the room. "There never has been any mystery about my thinking
her--all in her own way--the nicest girl in London. She IS."

His companion was silent a little. "She is, by all means. Well," she
then added, "so far as I may have been alive to the fact of any one's
thinking her so, it's not out of place I should mention to you the
difference made in my appreciation of it by our delightful little stay
at Mertle. My views for Nanda," said Mrs. Brook, "have somehow gone up."

Vanderbank was prompt to show how he could understand it. "So that you
wouldn't consider even Mitchy now?"

But his friend took no notice of the question. "The way Mr. Longdon
d