It made Vanderbank, restless now and turning about the room, stop with a smile at Mrs. Brook. “We understand too well!”
“Not if he doesn’t understand,” she replied after a moment while she turned to Mitchy, “that his real ‘combination’ can in the nature of the case only be—!”
“Oh yes”—Mitchy took her straight up—“with the young thing who is, as you say, positively and helplessly modern and the pious fraud of whose classic identity with a sheet of white paper has been—ah tacitly of course, but none the less practically!—dropped. You’ve so often reminded me. I do understand. If I were to go in for Aggie it would only be to oblige. The modern girl, the product of our hard London facts and of her inevitable consciousness of them just as they are—she, wonderful being, IS, I fully recognise, my real affair, and I’m not ashamed to say that when I like the individual I’m not afraid of the type. She knows too much—I don’t say; but she doesn’t know after all a millionth part of what I do.”
“I’m not sure!” Mrs. Brook earnestly exclaimed.
He had rung out and he kept it up with a limpidity unusual. “And product for product, when you come to that, I’m a queerer one myself than any other. The traditions I smash!” Mitchy laughed.
Mrs. Brook had got up and Vanderbank had gone again to the window. “That’s exactly why,” she returned. “You’re a pair of monsters and your monstrosity fits. She does know too much,” she added.
“Well,” said Mitchy with resolution, “it’s all my fault.”
“Not ALL—unless,” Mrs. Brook returned, “that’s only a sweet way of saying that it’s mostly mine.”
“Oh yours too—immensely; in fact every one’s. Even Edward’s, I dare say; and certainly, unmistakably, Harold’s. Ah and Van’s own—rather!” Mitchy continued; “for all he turns his back and will have nothing to say to it.”
It was on the back Vanderbank turned that Mrs. Brook’s eyes now rested. “That’s precisely why he shouldn’t be afraid of her.”