“Well, she HAS gone at a pace—if Mitchy doesn’t mind,” Harold interposed in the tone of tact and taste. “But then don’t they always—I mean when they’re like Aggie and they once get loose—go at a pace? That’s what I want to know. I don’t suppose mother did, nor Tishy, nor the Duchess,” he communicated to the rest; “but mother and Tishy and the Duchess, it strikes me, must either have been of the school that knew, don’t you know? a deuce of a deal before, or of the type that takes it all more quietly after.”
“I think a woman can only speak for herself. I took it all quietly enough both before and after,” said Mrs. Brook. Then she addressed to Mr. Cashmore with a small formal nod one of her lovely wan smiles. “What I’m talking about, s’il vous plait, is marriage.”
“I wonder if you know,” the Duchess broke out on this, “how silly you all sound! When did it ever, in any society that could call itself decently ‘good,’ NOT make a difference that an innocent young creature, a flower tended and guarded, should find from one day to the other her whole consciousness changed? People pull long faces and look wonderful looks and punch each other, in your English fashion, in the sides, and say to each other in corners that my poor darling has ‘come out.’ Je crois bien, she has come out! I married her—I don’t mind saying it now—exactly that she SHOULD come out, and I should be mightily ashamed of every one concerned if she hadn’t. I didn’t marry her, I give you to believe, that she should stay ‘in,’ and if any of you think to frighten Mitchy with it I imagine you’ll do so as little as you frighten ME. If it has taken her a very short time—as Harold so vividly puts it—to which of you did I ever pretend, I should like to know, that it would take her a very long one? I dare say there are girls it would have taken longer, just as there are certainly others who wouldn’t have required so much as an hour. It surely isn’t news to you that if some young persons among us all are very stupid and others very wise, MY dear child was never either, but only perfectly bred and deliciously clever. Ah THAT—rather! If she’s so clever that you don’t know what to do with her it’s scarcely HER fault. But add to it that Mitchy’s very kind, and you have the whole thing. What more do you want?”
Mrs. Brook, who looked immensely struck, replied with the promptest sympathy, yet as if there might have been an alternative. “I don’t think”—and her eyes appealed to the others—“that we want ANY more, do we? than the whole thing.”
“Gracious, I should hope not!” her husband remarked as privately as before to Vanderbank. “Jane—for a mixed company—does go into it.”
Vanderbank, for a minute and with a special short arrest, took in the circle. “Should you call us ‘mixed’? There’s only ONE girl.”
Edward Brookenham glanced at his daughter. “Yes, but I wish there were more.”
“DO you?” And Vanderbank’s laugh at this odd view covered, for a little, the rest of the talk. But when he again began to follow no victory had yet been snatched.
It was Mrs. Brook naturally who rattled the standard. “When you say, dearest, that we don’t know what to ‘do’ with Aggie’s cleverness, do you quite allow for the way we bow down before it and worship it? I don’t quite see what else we—in here—can do with it, even though we HAVE gathered that, just over there, Petherton’s finding for it a different application. We can only each in our way do our best. Don’t therefore succumb, Jane, to the delusive harm of a grievance. There would be nothing in it. You haven’t got one. The beauty of the life that so many of us have so long led together”—and she showed that it was for Mr. Longdon she more particularly brought this out—“is precisely that nobody has ever had one. Nobody has dreamed of it—it would have been such a rough false note, a note of violence out of all keeping. Did YOU ever hear of one, Van? Did you, my poor Mitchy? But you see for yourselves,” she wound up with a sigh and before either could answer, “how inferior we’ve become when we have even in our defence to assert such things.”
Mitchy, who for a while past had sat gazing at the floor, now raised his good natural goggles and stretched his closed mouth to its widest. “Oh I think we’re pretty good still!” he then replied.