“He thinks I want him myself,” Mrs. Brook blandly explained.
She was indeed, as they always thought her, “wonderful,” but she was perhaps not even now so much so as Mitchy found himself able to be. “But how would you lose old Van—even at the worst?” he earnestly asked of her.
She just hesitated. “What do you mean by the worst?”
“Then even at the best,” Mitchy smiled. “In the event of his falsifying your prediction; which, by the way, has the danger, hasn’t it?—I mean for your intellectual credit—of making him, as we all used to be called by our nursemaids, ‘contrairy.’”
“Oh I’ve thought of that,” Mrs. Brook returned. “But he won’t do, on the whole, even for the sweetness of spiting me, what he won’t want to do. I haven’t said I should lose him,” she went on; “that’s only the view he himself takes—or, to do him perfect justice, the idea he candidly imputes to me; though without, I imagine—for I don’t go so far as that—attributing to me anything so unutterably bete as a feeling of jealousy.”
“You wouldn’t dream of my supposing anything inept of you,” Vanderbank said on this, “if you understood to the full how I keep on admiring you. Only what stupefies me a little,” he continued, “is the extraordinary critical freedom—or we may call it if we like the high intellectual detachment—with which we discuss a question touching you, dear Mrs. Brook, so nearly and engaging so your private and most sacred sentiments. What are we playing with, after all, but the idea of Nanda’s happiness?”
“Oh I’m not playing!” Mrs. Brook declared with a little rattle of emotion.
“She’s not playing”—Mr. Mitchett gravely confirmed it. “Don’t you feel in the very air the vibration of the passion that she’s simply too charming to shake at the window as the housemaid shakes the tablecloth or the jingo the flag?” Then he took up what Vanderbank had previously said. “Of course, my dear man, I’m ‘aware,’ as you just now put it, of everything, and I’m not indiscreet, am I, Mrs. Brook? in admitting for you as well as for myself that there WAS an impossibility you and I used sometimes to turn over together. Only—Lord bless us all!—it isn’t as if I hadn’t long ago seen that there’s nothing at all FOR me.”
“Ah wait, wait!” Mrs. Brook put in. “She has a theory”—Vanderbank, from his chair, lighted it up for Mitchy, who hovered before them—“that your chance WILL come, later on, after I’ve given my measure.”
“Oh but that’s exactly,” Mitchy was quick to respond, “what you’ll never do! You won’t give your measure the least little bit. You’ll walk in magnificent mystery ‘later on’ not a bit less than you do today; you’ll continue to have the benefit of everything that our imagination, perpetually engaged, often baffled and never fatigued, will continue to bedeck you with. Nanda, in the same way, to the end of all her time, will simply remain exquisite, or genuine, or generous—whatever we choose to call it. It may make a difference to us, who are comparatively vulgar, but what difference will it make to HER whether you do or you don’t decide for her? You can’t belong to her more, for herself, than you do already—and that’s precisely so much that there’s no room for any one else. Where therefore, without that room, do I come in?”