She looked barely conscious. “‘Worked it’?” After which, with a slightly sharper note: “How do you know—while you’ve been amusing yourself in places that I’d give my head to see again but never shall—what I’ve been doing?”
“Well, I saw, you know, that night at Tishy’s, just before we left England, your wonderful start. I got a look at your attitude, as it were, and your system.”
Her eyes were now far away, and she spoke after an instant without moving them. “And didn’t I by the same token get a look at yours?”
“Mine?” Mitchy thought, but seemed to doubt. “My dear child, I hadn’t any then.”
“You mean that it has formed itself—your system—since?”
He shook his head with decision. “I assure you I’m quite at sea. I’ve never had, and I have as little as ever now, anything but my general philosophy, which I won’t attempt at present to go into and of which moreover I think you’ve had first and last your glimpses. What I made out in you that night was a perfect policy.”
Mrs. Brook had another of her infantine stares. “Every one that night seems to have made out something! All I can say is at any rate,” she went on, “that in that case you were all far deeper than I was.”
“It was just a blind instinct, without a programme or a scheme? Perhaps then, since it has so perfectly succeeded, the name doesn’t matter. I’m lost, as I tell you,” Mitchy declared, “in admiration of its success.”
She looked, as before, so young, yet so grave. “What do you call its success?”
“Let me ask you rather—mayn’t I?—what YOU call its failure.”