Mitchy wondered at the other two. “Between Edward and the girl?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Between Petherton and Jane.”
Mitchy could only stare, and the wide noonday light of his regard was at such moments really the redemption of his ugliness. “What ‘is’ there? Is there anything?”
“It’s too beautiful,” Mrs. Brookenham appreciatively sighed, “your relation with him! You won’t compromise him.”
“It would be nicer of me,” Mitchy laughed, “not to want to compromise HER!”
“Oh Jane!” Mrs. Brookenham dropped. “DOES he like her?” she continued. “You must know.”
“Ah it’s just my knowing that constitutes the beauty of my loyalty—of my delicacy.” He had his quick jumps too. “Am I never, never to see the child?”
This enquiry appeared only to confirm his friend in the view of what was touching in him. “You’re the most delicate thing I know, and it crops up with effect the oddest in the intervals of your corruption. Your talk’s half the time impossible; you respect neither age nor sex nor condition; one doesn’t know what you’ll say or do next; and one has to return your books—c’est tout dire—under cover of darkness. Yet there’s in the midst of all this and in the general abyss of you a little deepdown delicious niceness, a sweet sensibility, that one has actually one’s self, shocked as one perpetually is at you, quite to hold one’s breath and stay one’s hand for fear of ruffling or bruising. There’s no one in talk with whom,” she balmily continued, “I find myself half so often suddenly moved to pull up short. You’ve more little toes to tread on—though you pretend you haven’t: I mean morally speaking, don’t you know?—than even I have myself, and I’ve so many that I could wish most of them cut off. You never spare me a shock—no, you don’t do that: it isn’t the form your delicacy takes. But you’ll know what I mean, all the same, I think, when I tell you that there are lots I spare YOU!”
Mr. Mitchett fairly glowed with the candour of his attention. “Know what you mean, dearest lady? How can a man handicapped to death, a man of my origin, my appearance, my general weaknesses, drawbacks, immense indebtedness, all round, for the start, as it were, that I feel my friends have been so good as to allow me: how can such a man not be conscious every moment that every one about him goes on tiptoe and winks at every one else? What CAN you all mention in my presence, poor things, that isn’t personal?”
Mrs. Brookenham’s face covered him for an instant as no painted Madonna’s had ever covered the little charge at the breast beneath it. “And the finest thing of all in you is your beautiful, beautiful pride! You’re prouder than all of us put together.” She checked a motion that he had apparently meant as a protest—she went on with her muffled wisdom. “There isn’t a man but YOU whom Petherton wouldn’t have made vulgar. He isn’t vulgar himself—at least not exceptionally; but he’s just one of those people, a class one knows well, who are so fearfully, in this country, the cause of it in others. For all I know he’s the cause of it in me—the cause of it even in poor Edward. For I’m vulgar, Mitchy dear—very often; and the marvel of you is that you never are.”