“Well, Jane, you do say things to me!” Mrs. Brookenham blandly broke in. She had sunk back into her chair; her hands, in her lap pressed themselves together and her wan smile brought a tear into each of her eyes by the very effort to be brighter. It might have been guessed of her that she hated to seem to care, but that she had other dislikes too. “If one were to take up, you know, some of the things you say—!” And she positively sighed for the wealth of amusement at them of which her tears were the sign. Her friend could quite match her indifference. “Well, my child, TAKE them up; if you were to do that with them candidly, one by one, you would do really very much what I should like to bring you to. Do you see?” Mrs. Brookenham’s failure to repudiate the vision appeared to suffice, and her visitor cheerfully took a further jump. “As much of Tishy as she wants—AFTER. But not before.”
“After what?”
“Well—say after Mr. Mitchett. Mr. Mitchett won’t take her after Mrs. Grendon.”
“And what are your grounds for assuming that he’ll take her at all?” Then as the Duchess hung fire a moment: “Have you got it by chance from Lord Petherton?”
The eyes of the two women met for a little on this, and there might have been a consequence of it in the manner of what came. “I’ve got it from not being a fool. Men, I repeat, like the girls they marry—”
“Oh I already know your old song! The way they like the girls they DON’T marry seems to be,” Mrs. Brookenham mused, “what more immediately concerns us. You had better wait till you HAVE made Aggie’s fortune perhaps—to be so sure of the working of your system. Pardon me, darling, if I don’t take you for an example until you’ve a little more successfully become one. I know what the sort of men worth speaking of are not looking for. They ARE looking for smart safe sensible English girls.”
The Duchess glanced at the clock. “What’s Mr. Vanderbank looking for?”
Her companion appeared to oblige her by anxiously thinking. “Oh, HE, I’m afraid, poor dear—for nothing at all!”
The Duchess had taken off a glove to appease her appetite, and now, drawing it on, she smoothed it down. “I think he has his ideas.”
“The same as yours?”