was nice of her. She was a person with whom I could talk about her."

Vanderbank took a moment to clear up the ambiguity. "Oh you mean you
could talk about the OTHER. You hadn't got over Lady Julia."

Mr. Longdon sadly smiled at him. "I haven't got over her yet!" Then,
however, as if not to look morbid, he took pains to be clear. "The first
wound was bad--but from that one always comes round. Your mother,
dear woman, had known how to help me. Lady Julia was at that time her
intimate friend--it was she who introduced me there. She couldn't help
what happened--she did her best. What I meant just now was that in the
aftertime, when opportunity occurred, she was the one person with whom I
could always talk and who always understood." He lost himself an instant
in the deep memories to attest which he had survived alone; then he
sighed out as if the taste of it all came back to him with a faint
sweetness: "I think they must both have been good to me. At the Malvern
time, the particular time I just mentioned to you, Lady Julia was
already married, and during those first years she had been whirled out
of my ken. Then her own life took a quieter turn; we met again; I went
for a good while often to her house. I think she rather liked the state
to which she had reduced me, though she didn't, you know, in the least
presume on it. The better a woman is--it has often struck me--the more
she enjoys in a quiet way some fellow's having been rather bad, rather
dark and desperate, about her--for her. I dare say, I mean, that though
Lady Julia insisted I ought to marry she wouldn't really have liked it
much if I had. At any rate it was in those years I saw her daughter just
cease to be a child--the little girl who was to be transformed by time
into the so different person with whom we dined to-night. That comes
back to me when I hear you speak of the growing up, in turn, of that
person's own daughter."

"I follow you with a sympathy--!" Vanderbank replied. "The situation's
reproduced."

"Ah partly--not altogether. The things that are unlike--well, are so
VERY unlike." Mr. Longdon for a moment, on this, fixed his companion
with eyes that betrayed one of the restless little jumps of his mind. "I
told you just now that there's something I seem to make out in you."

"Yes, that was meant for better things?"--Vanderbank frankly took him
up. "There IS something, I really believe--meant for ever so much better
ones. Those are just the sort I