“‘All’ is soon said! Life is composed of many things,” Mrs. Brookenham gently rang out—“of such mingled intertwisted strands!” Then still with the silver bell, “Don’t you really think Tishy nice?” she asked.
“I think little girls should live with little girls and young femmes du monde so immensely initiated should—well,” said the Duchess with a toss of her head, “let them alone. What do they want of them ‘at all at all’?”
“Well, my dear, if Tishy strikes you as ‘initiated’ all one can ask is ‘Initiated into what?’ I should as soon think of applying such a term to a little shivering shorn lamb. Is it your theory,” Mrs. Brookenham pursued, “that our unfortunate unmarried daughters are to have no intelligent friends?”
“Unfortunate indeed,” cried the Duchess, “precisely BECAUSE they’re unmarried, and unmarried, if you don’t mind my saying so, a good deal because they’re unmarriageable. Men, after all, the nice ones—by which I mean the possible ones—are not on the lookout for little brides whose usual associates are so up to snuff. It’s not their idea that the girls they marry shall already have been pitchforked—by talk and contacts and visits and newspapers and by the way the poor creatures rush about and all the extraordinary things they do—quite into EVERYTHING. A girl’s most intelligent friend is her mother—or the relative acting as such. Perhaps you consider that Tishy takes your place!”
Mrs. Brookenham waited so long to say what she considered that before she next spoke the question appeared to have dropped. Then she only replied as if suddenly remembering her manners: “Won’t you eat something?” She indicated a particular plate. “One of the nice little round ones?” The Duchess appropriated a nice little round one and her hostess presently went on: “There’s one thing I mustn’t forget—don’t let us eat them ALL. I believe they’re what Lord Petherton really comes for.”
The Duchess finished her mouthful imperturbably before she took this up. “Does he come so often?”
Mrs. Brookenham might have been, for judicious candour, the Muse of History. “I don’t know what he calls it; but he said yesterday that he’d come today. I’ve had tea earlier for you,” she went on with her most melancholy kindness—“and he’s always late. But we mustn’t, between us, lick the platter clean.”
The Duchess entered very sufficiently into her companion’s tone. “Oh I don’t feel at all obliged to consider him, for he has not of late particularly put himself out for me. He has not been to see me since I don’t know when, and the last time he did come he brought Mr. Mitchett.”
“Here it was the other way round. It was Mr. Mitchett, the other year, who first brought Lord Petherton.”
“And who,” asked the Duchess, “had first brought Mr. Mitchett?”