“There can’t be a place in London,” Mrs. Brook pursued, “where they’re not delighted to dress such a woman. She shows things, don’t you see? as some fine tourist region shows the placards in the fields and the posters on the rocks. And what proof can you adduce?” she asked.
Mr. Cashmore had grown restless; he picked a stray thread off the knee of his trousers. “Ah when you talk about ‘adducing’—!” He appeared to intimate—as with the hint that if she didn’t take care she might bore him—that it was the kind of word he used only in the House of Commons.
“When I talk about it you can’t meet me,” she placidly returned. But she fixed him with her weary penetration. “You try to believe what you CAN’T believe, in order to give yourself excuses. And she does the same—only less, for she recognises less in general the need of them. She’s so grand and simple.”
Poor Mr. Cashmore stared. “Grander and simpler than I, you mean?”
Mrs. Brookenham thought. “Not simpler—no; but very much grander. She wouldn’t, in the case you conceive, recognise really the need of WHAT you conceive.”
Mr. Cashmore wondered—it was almost mystic. “I don’t understand you.”
Mrs. Brook, seeing it all from dim depths, tracked it further and further. “We’ve talked her over so!”
Mr. Cashmore groaned as if too conscious of it. “Indeed we have!”
“I mean WE”—and it was wonderful how her accent discriminated. “We’ve talked you too—but of course we talk to every one.” She had a pause through which there glimmered a ray from luminous hours, the inner intimacy which, privileged as he was, he couldn’t pretend to share; then she broke out almost impatiently: “We’re looking after her—leave her to US!”
His envy of this nearer approach to what so touched him than he could himself achieve was in his face, but he tried to throw it off. “I doubt if after all you’re good for her.”