“I see,” said Mrs. Brook blandly, “and he likes you in return as much as he despises me. That makes it all right—makes me somehow so happy for you. There’s something in him—what is it?—that suggests the oncle d’Amerique, the eccentric benefactor, the fairy godmother. He’s a little of an old woman—but all the better for it.” She hung fire but an instant before she pursued: “What can we make him do for you?”
Vanderbank at this was very blank. “Do for me?”
“How can any one love you,” she asked, “without wanting to show it in some way? You know all the ways, dear Van,” she breathed, “in which I want to show it.”
He might have known them, something suddenly fixed in his face appeared to say, but they were not what was, on this speech of hers, most immediately present to him. “That for instance is the tone not to take with him.”
“There you are!” she sighed with discouragement. “Well, only TELL me.” Then as he said nothing: “I must be more like mamma?”
His expression confessed to his feeling an awkwardness. “You’re perhaps not quite enough like her.”
“Oh I know that if he deplores me as I am now she would have done so quite as much; in fact probably, as seeing it nearer, a good deal more. She’d have despised me even more than he. But if it’s a question,” Mrs. Brook went on, “of not saying what mamma wouldn’t, how can I know, don’t you see, what she WOULD have said?” Mrs. Brook became as wonderful as if she saw in her friend’s face some admiring reflexion of the fine freedom of mind that—in such a connexion quite as much as in any other—she could always show. “Of course I revere mamma just as much as he does, and there was everything in her to revere. But she was none the less in every way a charming woman too, and I don’t know, after all, do I? what even she—in their peculiar relation—may not have said to him.”
Vanderbank’s laugh came back. “Very good—very good. I return to my first idea. Try with him whatever comes into your head. You’re a woman of genius after all, and genius mostly justifies itself. To make you right,” he went on pleasantly and inexorably, “might perhaps be to make you wrong. Since you HAVE so great a charm trust it not at all or all in all. That, I dare say, is all you can do. Therefore—yes—be yourself.”
These remarks were followed on either side by the repetition of a somewhat intenser mutual gaze, though indeed the speaker’s eyes had more the air of meeting his friend’s than of seeking them. “I can’t be YOU certainly, Van,” Mrs. Brook sadly brought forth.
“I know what you mean by that,” he rejoined in a moment. “You mean I’m hypocritical.”