“And also”—the speaker hesitated—“for esteem?”
Mitchy laughed out. “For veneration! Our disrespects, I think, are all tender, and we wouldn’t for the world do to a person we don’t like anything so nice as to call him, or even to call her, don’t you know—?”
His questioner had quickly looked as if he knew. “Something pleasant and vulgar?”
Mitchy’s gaiety deepened. “That discrimination’s our only austerity. You must fall in.”
“Then what will you call ME?”
“What can we?” After which, sustainingly, “I’m ‘Mitchy,’” our friend stated.
His interlocutor looked slightly queer. “I don’t think I can quite begin. I’m Mr. Longdon,” he almost blushed to articulate.
“Absolutely and essentially—that’s exactly what I recognise. I defy any one to see you,” Mitchy declared, “as anything else, and on that footing you’ll be, among us, unique.”
Mr. Longdon appeared to accept his prospect of isolation with a certain gravity. “I gather from you—I’ve gathered indeed from Mr. Vanderbank—that you’re a little sort of a set that hang very much together.”
“Oh yes; not a formal association nor a secret society—still less a ‘dangerous gang’ or an organisation for any definite end. We’re simply a collection of natural affinities,” Mitchy explained; “meeting perhaps principally in Mrs. Brook’s drawing-room—though sometimes also in old Van’s, as you see, sometimes even in mine—and governed at any rate everywhere by Mrs. Brook, in our mysterious ebbs and flows, very much as the tides are governed by the moon. As I say,” Mitchy pursued, “you must join. But if Van has got hold of you,” he added, “or you’ve got hold of him, you HAVE joined. We’re not quite so numerous as I could wish, and we want variety; we want just what I’m sure you’ll bring us—a fresh eye, an outside mind.”