“Do you mean he has told you so?”
“Oh no—we never mention it! But he likes her,” Mr. Mitchett stubbornly repeated. “And he’s thoroughly straight.”
Mrs. Brookenham for a moment turned these things over; after which she came out in a manner that visibly surprised him. “It isn’t as if you wished to be nasty about him, is it?—because I know you like him yourself. You’re so wonderful to your friends”—oh she could let him see that she knew!—“and in such different and exquisite ways. There are those like HIM”—she signified her other visitor—“who get everything out of you and whom you really appear fond of, or at least to put up with, just FOR that. Then there are those who ask nothing—and whom you’re fond of in spite of it.”
Mitchy leaned back from this, fist within fist, watching her with a certain disguised emotion. He grinned almost too much for mere amusement. “That’s the class to which YOU belong.”
“It’s the best one,” she returned, “and I’m careful to remain in it. You try to get us, by bribery, into the inferior place, because, proud as you are, it bores you a little that you like us so much. But we won’t go—at least I won’t. You may make Van,” she wonderfully continued. “There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him or give him.” Mitchy admired her from his position, slowly shaking his head with it. “He’s the man—with no fortune and just as he is, to the smallest particular—whom you would have liked to be, whom you intensely envy, and yet to whom you’re magnanimous enough for almost any sacrifice.”
Mitchy’s appreciation had fairly deepened to a flush. “Magnificent, magnificent Mrs. Brook! What ARE you in thunder up to?”
“Therefore, as I say,” she imperturbably went on, “it’s not to do him an ill turn that you make a point of what you’ve just told me.”
Mr. Mitchett for a minute gave no sign but his high colour and his queer glare. “How could it do him an ill turn?”
“Oh it WOULD be a way, don’t you see? to put before me the need of getting rid of him. For he may ‘like’ Nanda as much as you please: he’ll never, never,” Mrs. Brookenham resolutely quavered—“he’ll never come to the scratch. And to feel that as I do,” she explained, “can only be, don’t you also see? to want to save her.”
It would have appeared at last that poor Mitchy did see. “By taking it in time? By forbidding him the house?”