“Then you take the view—?” Mitchy, who had, after all, his delicacies, pulled up as at sight of a name.
“I take the view,” said the Duchess, “and I know exactly why. Elle se les passe—her little fancies! She’s a phenomenon, poor dear. And all with—what shall I call it?—the absence of haunting remorse of a good house-mother who makes the family accounts balance. She looks—and it’s what they love her for here when they say ‘Watch her now!’—like an angry saint; but she’s neither a saint nor, to be perfectly fair to her, really angry at all. She has only just enough reflexion to make out that it may some day be a little better for her that her husband shall, on his side too, have committed himself; and she’s only, in secret, too pleased to be sure whom it has been with. All the same I must tell you,” the Duchess still more crisply added, “that our little friend Nanda is of the opinion—which I gather her to be quite ready to defend—that Lady Fanny’s wrong.”
Poor Mitchy found himself staring. “But what has our little friend Nanda to do with it?”
“What indeed, bless her heart? If you WILL ask questions, however, you must take, as I say, your risks. There are days when between you all you stupefy me. One of them was when I happened about a month ago to make some allusion to the charming example of Mr. Cashmore’s fine taste that we have there before us: what was my surprise at the tone taken by Mrs. Brook to deny on this little lady’s behalf the soft impeachment? It was quite a mistake that anything had happened—Mrs. Donner had pulled through unscathed. She had been but a day or two at the most in danger, for her family and friends—the best influences—had rallied to her support: the flurry was all over. She was now perfectly safe. Do you think she looks so?” the Duchess asked.
This was not a point that Mitchy was conscious of freedom of mind to examine. “Do I understand you that Nanda was her mother’s authority—?”
“For the exact shade of the intimacy of the two friends and the state of Mrs. Brook’s information? Precisely—it was ‘the latest before going to press.’ ‘Our own correspondent’! Her mother quoted her.”
Mr. Mitchett visibly wondered. “But how should Nanda know—?”
“Anything about the matter? How should she NOT know everything? You’ve not, I suppose, lost sight of the fact that this lady and Mrs. Grendon are sisters. Carrie’s situation and Carrie’s perils are naturally very present to the extremely unoccupied Tishy, who is unhappily married into the bargain, who has no children, and whose house, as you may imagine, has a good thick atmosphere of partisanship. So, as with Nanda, on HER side, there’s no more absorbing interest than her dear friend Tishy, with whom she’s at present staying and under whose roof she perpetually meets this victim of unjust aspersions—!”
“I see the whole thing from here, you imply?” Mr. Mitchett, under the influence of this rapid evocation, had already taken his line. “Well,” he said bravely, “Nanda’s not a fool.”
A momentary silence on the part of the Duchess might have been her tribute to his courage. “No. I don’t agree with her, as it happens, here; but that there are matters as to which she’s not in general at all befogged is exactly the worst I ever said of her. And I hold that in putting it so—on the basis of my little anecdote—you clearly give out that you’re answered.”